XServer Crashes When Playing a Video

Thursday, January 31. 2008

Suddenly my XServer startet to crash each time I started to play any video on my Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon installation (there will be a more detailed update on the real installation after my evaluation soon). A backtrace shows that this was caused by the ATI fglrx driver (installed version: 8.443).


The reason? In the office I work on an external monitor and some days ago I moved the XV overlay to the monitor using the command aticonfig --overlay-on=1. After the next Xserver restart it worked. What I didn't notice at that time was that this would cause big problems, when no external monitor is connected.

Someone would expect to simply get a black video player window, while the video overlay is beeing displayed on the non existing external monitor. But in fact this simply crashes the Xserver and brings you back to the login screen.

Running aticonfig --overlay-on=0 and restarting the Xserver fixed this problem.


Posted by Carsten Schlipf Filed under Linux.
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    #1 Matthias on 02/25/08 at 08:44 PM [Reply]
    *Hm, didn't work for me. Same issue, since 8.443, I think. I didn't mess around with overlay-on, though.
    #1.1 Matthias on 02/25/08 at 08:47 PM [Reply]
    *Option "Xinerama" "true" - D'oh!

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