Black Flickering Lines in Mplayer?
| February 8th, 2010Today I made the mistake of upgrading my girlfriends LinuxMint on her Dell mini 10. After a new kernel was installed the video went to shit. It uses the Intel GMA500 “Poulsbo” video hardware.
I thought it would improve performance to do the entire upgrade like this one here. However the upgrade just made everything shitty. Soon after the upgrade I attempted to playback a nice big video with mplayer and I got a shitty choppy playback and a shitty black flickering bar towards the lower part of the playback. So, I googled for a few hours only to find a ton of others bitching about this driver and how much Intel sucks for this. After readin about all i could fucking stand about the psb driver, one of my old i810 video tips came to mind. Appending “mem=” to your kernel boot line to specify how much memory the kernel uses, Leaving some for the video system.
In your grub/menu.lst find your kernel line:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash
Add “mem=SOMETHING LESS THAN YOUR ACTUAL MEMORY”
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash mem=1000mb
Her mini 10 only has a gig of memory so I am using “mem=1000″, thats in Megabytes and there is 1024 of them in a Gig of ram so this should leave me 24MB’s for video.. if it needs it.
Wouldn’t ya know it, It worked. 
Hope this stupid post helps somebody out. Please share your comments.
Mplayer seems to work just fine in fluxbox, but my Gnomes are still wreaking havoc on the video. Yes, yes, I know what all the geeks will say the solution is – dump Gnome and use fluxbox. Well, I’m a girl and I like all my pretty Gnome stuff.
Honey, if you get a chance could you please take a look at my mplayer again? <3 u