projectM black screen

time passes, but nothing happens (??) I'm working on the third machine with ion chipset and all have this problem: no projectm visualizations, black screen instead. Sometimes playing a movie first and then playing music with visualizations works. When it does, it can play the whole afternoon without crashing. When it does not work, it crashes (and restarts) leaving no traces in the log after not more than 5-10 minutes. I'm on minimal jaunty with rev. 24886. Zotac ion mb, 1920x1080 res., nvidia 190.42. Kernel is custom 2.6.31.6. No other suspect services like samba running.

Anybody?

Hi,
I have the same problem - just after starting the computer running XBMC 9.11 beta 2, Ubuntu 9.10, I am unable to see any visualization from Project M. My hardware is Zotac ION with latest NVidia drivers 190.42. If I played some video before, the Project M suddenly shows. It seems that the visualisation doesn't properly initialize the graphics card.

If you want some additional information, you can mail me at honza (dot) svec a gmail.com .

Thank you for feedback
Honzas from Pilsen

rickx Wrote:time passes, but nothing happens (??) I'm working on the third machine with ion chipset and all have this problem: no projectm visualizations, black screen instead. Sometimes playing a movie first and then playing music with visualizations works. When it does, it can play the whole afternoon without crashing. When it does not work, it crashes (and restarts) leaving no traces in the log after not more than 5-10 minutes. I'm on minimal jaunty with rev. 24886. Zotac ion mb, 1920x1080 res., nvidia 190.42. Kernel is custom 2.6.31.6. No other suspect services like samba running.

Anybody?

I get the same result when using projectm.

Same here, with Camelot beta2

Both my 9400m motherboard Karmic minimal install and
also with my 8600m laptop video card Ubuntu Karmic full install

ProjectM gives a black screen.

Same here:

Nvidia 8200, Karmic, beta2, 190.42

Could this be nvidia related?

i can confirm that adding export LC_ALL="C" to /usr/bin/xbmc or /usr/local/bin/xbmc, depending on the location of the file, still fixes the projectM vis... i noticed too that playing a music plugin and trying to output a vis (which i think is impossible, as plugins use dvdplayer instead of paplayer, as far as i can remember) completely breaks vis, no way to have projectM again, even after playing a video or anything.
can anyone with this problem confirm?
btw, i'm going to install on my ati-based laptop just to see if it depends on nvidia, as all my other pcs are nvidia based, or somehow on the locale, as setting LC_ALL seems to fix it

2 questions to see if this might be related to an issue I am seeing:

a) for me, when I kill xbmc.bin an restart it - projectM always works. But it always fails after the first boot of the system. Anyone experience the same ?

b) if I let xbmc run long enough with a black screen, it crashes after some songs. Anyone with linux knowledge able to attach gdb to the running process, and cause the crash ?

I also experience this with nvidia, but for me playing a video first doesn't help (at least if I play it for a short period) and the LC_ALL workaround doesn't do anything here either - so the issues might be different.


update: I take back that the LC_ALL fix doesn't work. It does. Probably some problem with float values again, that get parsed wrong - there was a similar issue before. I'll see if I maybe get the workaround or some fix into Camelot before release, I'll nag the team

Maybe this helps somebody...
I was successful at last!! I followed succo's advice (which had not worked the first time I tried on an older revision) after installing the new rc1 xbmc. Only other thing I did was reconfiguring the locales package, after making sure it was installed at all...
So I did
which indeed updated some of the languages. I have no proof that this has something to do with projectm now working flawlessly and - as a consequence - xbmc running for hours without crashing. It had not done so for months now.

The issue has more or less been identified - has to do with certain string functions that convert strings to float numbers, that fail on certain locale settings - an example would be German locals that us the "," as a seperator (like 1,2 and not 1.2). When parsing from the config file or a preset, the conversion fails and thus the problem.

If I am correct, should all be fixed in:
http://trac.xbmc.org/changeset/25830

just built 25856 and i still need to export LC_ALL, no way yet...