[SpiffBB]

Hello
Have a really strange problem, tried for hours to solve it but no luck.
I have installed a Mac Mini with XBMC Live 8.10. Then I start a Video it played for about a minute and then the screen went black (tried several different videos). I could still hear the sound of the movie or go back to the main many and hear clicks then pressing any key. There were NO way to get picture back without rebooting!

Tried several tip and tricks found in other thread for improving the preformance, for example maximaze all cache size, turn on vertical sync, disable library, disable upnp etc. The resaulte is that now it can play a video up to about ten minutes before the screen goes black.

Please help me, I know the Mac Mini has a week graphic card (Intel 950), its a Intel 2 ghz model with 2 gb RAM so it should be enough?! Have had an eye on the system info and there were no sign of high cpu or ram use.
/O

[althekiller]

Sounds like DPMS or some other powersaving stuff kicked in. Make sure any screensaver daemons aren't running and try disabling DPMS from the console with "sudo xset dpms force off".

[SpiffBB]

Thanks! Unfortunately it didnt work.
Tried and got:
Xset: unable to open display ""
So found this guide:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=563574
Then i checked that there were some energy saving output with:
xset -q
then:
sudo xset dpms force off (and also one time as ordinary user)
checked that it was gone with: xset -q
Also disabled screensaver in XBMC.
Video just as before, plays a few minutes and then the screen goes black. Tried with both Mediastream and PM3HD

Other suggestions?!
/O

[althekiller]

Pastebin a debug log.

[SpiffBB]

Pastebin a debug log.

Thank you for taking time!
I reproduced the failure and here is the log:
http://pastebin.com/f6571b563

Hovever I have spent hours on google....... Unfortunatly this seams to be a common problem with the intel driver. It got better in Ubuntu 8.10 (but XBMC live 8.10 is build on Ubuntu 8.04) but a kernal update brooke it again. Now waiting and hoping for Ubuntu 9.10.....

There are some fixes. One is to change render from EXA to the old XAA
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sourc...bug/252094

Another is to shut of framebuffersompression
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sourc...bug/218334

And the third is optimazion to EXA renderer
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sourc...bug/152206

I have tried all three and they make things a lot better, no black video. However there still are problems for example then navigating the skin and browsing pictures (the computer frezes for 10 seconds from time to time).

The last one seams to work best so therefore I have add this to my xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
********Identifier "Configured Video Device"
********Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
********Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
********Option "ExaNoComposite" "false"
********Option "TexturedVideo" "false"
EndSection

Some post suggestied to change to vesa driver but havnt tried that yet (or actually have no ide how to do that......).

Hope this will be to some help, Intel 945/950 is quite popular so hope we together can find a perfect soultion!

Regards

[LinnyUK]

Hi,

I have a Mac mini with live 8.10 (although has done on previous versions) and I have the same problem. Sometimes goes black and sometimes goes a different colour and the only way to get back on screen is to reboot the Mac. It happens randomly for me and sometimes more frequent on various files. If you are using a DVI to HDMI adapter I found switching to DVI to VGA improved things although it still does sometimes do it.