Linux Video “Blue Flesh” Bug
This week I upgraded the guts in my desktop. For the video card I jumped up to an ASUS EN9600GT silent graphics card. It is pretty “bleeding edge” as far as Linux goes, and it is a double-wide card with a massive heatsink where others would have a fan. I like to reduce the white noise.
Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh.
I tried Googling up the fix, but didn’t get far. One page mentioned that I could run nvidia-bug-report.sh and send the debug log to linux-bugs@nvidia.com. Support from a hardware developer? For Linux? Stranger things have happened. I sent off a report on Friday night and on Saturday morning got an e-mail back from Aaron pointing me here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=107009
Verily, when I start X I have:
0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
"XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
client settable attribute
client gettable attribute (current value is 0)
And when I run a video and get blue people:
0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
"XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
client settable attribute
client gettable attribute (current value is 164)
Yet, they can be fixed like so:
0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvattr -a XV_HUE -v 0
Found Xv 2.2
XV_HUE set to 0
0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
"XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
client settable attribute
client gettable attribute (current value is 0)
Having the work-around moves this issue from awful to annoying. I tried resetting XV_HUE and invoking different players. I found these players producing the blue flesh bug:
- gxine
- (Totem) Movie Player
- mplayer
It was starting to look grim, when I found that one player doesn’t mess up the hue setting:
- VLC media player
Hopefully this bug gets worked out over the next few months. I’d like to give Aaron Plattner and nVidia a great deal of credit not only for grappling with this issue but for providing customer support for their products. Now I know which brand of video card to be loyal to!
