Fix: Video Playback under Compiz
From EasyPeasy Wiki
You may have noticed that two things will fail to run your Ubuntu Eee with Compiz effects turned on :
- Video playback via Totem (called "Movie Player" in Ubuntu).
- Cheese, or any tool that tries to show your webcam, even after the patch to get it working.
I haven't been able to get my webcam to work at all under Compiz (although it's fine if I turn Compiz effects off via the "Appearance" preference), but I have found two solutions to the video playback problem :
- Install VLC from Synaptic.
- Open VLC and go to its preferences.
- Find the "Output Module" option under "Video" and click on the "Advanced" button at the bottom right.
- Change the default output module to "OpenGL".
- Alternatively, you can install the media centre solution Elisa from Fluendo (which can be downloaded by adding a repository here) which also works a treat on my Eee, despite using the same Gstreamer backend as Totem. Note that Elisa isn't a video player in the syle of Totem, Mplayer or VLC. Rather, it's a (quite groovy) clone of Apple's Frontrow software, or possibly Windows Media Centre.
Please note that although videos will now playback happily in VLC, there are significant graphical glitches when you try to use any Compiz effects while the video is playing - the main one of which is that when you spin the cube, the VLC window borders will happily spin, but the video playback itself will not, which is a pretty strange effect.
You can follow the Eee user forum thread on this topic here.
