We didn’t think watching videos was going to be a major use-case for the webbook, partly because it doesn’t have a DVD drive, and partly because we thought we were going to ship it with a 2GB solid state drive so not much room for big video files. As it turned out we have a very roomy 80GB hard disk and plenty of people watch video podcasts in MP4 format. As I mentioned before, the drivers for the graphics card don’t really show off it’s full potential and playing videos highlights one area that the teacher would put on the report as “could do better”
Fortunately for us, the webbook can indeed do better, with just a little guidance. This version of the OpenChrome driver doesn’t do a particularly good job of handling the X Video extension. The point of the X Video extension is to allow the main CPU to hand over all the complicated video decoding to the graphics card. Basically the CPU says to the graphics card, “Please do some video decoding, you can draw it in this rectangle here, the data is over there, get on with it whilst I go do some other stuff”. Well that is great in theory, but in practice the graphics card just isn’t pulling it’s weight at the moment. Luckily for us the CPU of the webbook is nippy enough to do all the decoding itself (although it would probably struggle on HD content). We just have to tell the media player not to attempt to hand off the drawing to the lazy graphics card. Press alt+F2 to bring up the run program dialog then type in
gstreamer-properties
This will bring up a settings tool as shown below. On the video tab change the plugin from automatic to X Window System (No Xv). Now try playing your video again and you should have it playing back in glorious technicolour.
There will be better graphics drivers for the webbook, probably in an automatic update at some stage.
Tags: video
‘You da man, bro’
Thanks so much.
I’m off on a trip abroad soon and the fact I can watch movies on it is tilting my decision as to which machine to take, firmly in Woofie’s favour at the moment.
badly need those drivers, this fix dosnt do anything to help with flash video, only video played in totem! at the moment there is no bbc iplayer video and no full-screen youtube video, it’s all too jerky
quite right, this just helps with the Totem videos. You should have BBC iPlayer working in a window and YouTube. The frame rate does drop a bit when playing them fullscreen. I am not sure the graphics drivers are going to help the flash player very much, but I will try to compare the two later.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the advice. I’ve amended the gstreamer-properties with the following result:-
Movieplayer now plays the video but with no sound. VLC plays the sound but no video. I’m new to Linux and have recently purchased the Elonex Webbook. If I can get this sorted then I’ve got everything just about the way I want it.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Andy
@Andy
that is an interesting situation. I am at a bit of a loss regarding the lack of sound in the movie player, but I might be able to help with VLC. Basically just like movieplayer you need to turn off XV, the preference are just burried a little deeper. In VLC go to settings-preferences then Video/Output Modules. Click the advanced options checkbox at the bottom right then you will see a dropdown appear to select the video output module. Choose X11 video output and it should work. You can try some of the other options, “Color ASCII art video output” is completely mad!
Andy, as I’ve mentioned in one of my other replies I’m really interested in the graphics side of things, so after looking about and looking at the link for the windows drivers page it seems that the graphics card is the via vx700 card. Now a quick search on google and I found this page with the linux driver for the card on it http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=25&CatID=2580&SubCatID=183
Now the 1st file is your installation guide, the 2nd seems to tbe the file itself and the 3rd some sort of update. I recommend downloading the 2nd file to your windows machine as it’s a tar.gz file in a rar file? Stupid I know, so I un-rar’d it, then un tar’d it and then stuck the file on a usb pen and put it on the webbook ready.
I have not tried installing it yet as I don’t currently have the time, but thought you might wanna have a look anyway and see how you can get on.
Cheers
Adam
@Adam,
yes, that is the via unichrome drivers, unfortunately the ones they have published on that site don’t work on the webbook. They have provided me with a patched version but only the binary and it was compiled for kernel version 2.6.16. We are already on 2.6.19 and 2.6.20 will be along soon. I am trying to get the source code or a version compiled for the current kernel out of them. When you load a kernel module there are some checks to make sure that the module version matches the running kernel version. If it doesn’t match it doesn’t load. On my webbook I turned off this safety checking and forced it to load against the wrong kernel. It works great! The problem is that firstly the safety checks are there for a reason and we don’t really want to push out an ugly hack like this to everyone. Secondly if a new kernel comes out we need to be able to provide updated unichrome drivers for that straight away. I would not want all the webbooks to boot to a black screen on the same day!
Actually to clarify a bit, the drivers on the VIA Arena site work fine and load fine, and if you plug in an external monitor they are display great on that. They just don’t drive the LCD
Thanks so much for this fix I got my webbook yesterday and am still trying to get the hang of ubuntu but im prefering it to windows, and I had spent all day d/l codecs and a couple of media plyers then I found this site and within 10 seconds of adding your audio and video advice im watching a video with my earphones in and not annoying anybody
[...] Stephen Fry explaining why Software Freedom is important. To view the video you will first need to fix the video issue and as the audio is rather quiet I would reccommend headphones and fixing the speakers issue. Free [...]
Hi Alan,
Whilst trying to get an USB microphone working with my Webbook I started up Sound recorder and was told to configure my input device. I was directed to the Multimedia system selector screen from the control panel.
The options don’t really mean much to me though I’m afraid. And I can’t get my Logitech USB mic to work.
Have you any ideas as I really want to try out gtkGuitune to tune my guitar!
It would also be good to use Skype but as far as I’m aware there is no built in mic.?
@lukstar, there is a built in mic, front left, slap bang on top of the fan. Not the ideal positioning and I have never managed to get any good results from that. A regular headset microphone worked well for me.gtkGuitune looks interesting, I have used Audacity and I was planning an article about Audacity. have a look at this link, see if it helps you http://www.blog.highub.com/linux/make-logitech-usb-microphone-work-on-ubuntu/
Thank you yet again Alan for a solution to one of my only two Webbook irritations. (Sound but no video)
I tried installing media player after media player to solve my sound but no video problem. I uninstalled them all and installed ‘VLC player’ and followed the instructions in bullet point 5. above. I did a restart after it and now I get glorious sound AND video. Another ‘irritation’ solved and a webbook now running in a state of absolute perfection. Thank goodness for these blogs/forums.
Kind regards
bahkti
Hiya I previously had the linux version of the webbook and followed your tips on how to play videos which worked great, however my laptop started crashing and letting me down so I took it back to CPW for an exchange. They told me they had had alot of problems with the linux software so could only offer me an exchange with a Windows XP webbook, this suited me as im more used to Windows but im now faced with the problem of not being able to play videos again, can you help please? I tried pressing F2 but nothing worked and im only a basic user so my knowledge is very limited. They wont even play on media player.
@Lee, well that is unfortunate. I am afraid I don’t have an XP Webbook or an XP anything else for that matter. I can help you upgrade it to Linux and you can now get a recovery USB stick which will reflash it with Ubuntu. Maybe take it back to store and tell them that XP doesn’t play videos.
thanks for the response but i want to keep it as xp as i couldnt get on with linux. Will keep trying though thanks.
Hi I followed your advice for Video playback, and now can play divx files quite happily now, Albeit some of the audio is quiet on 100 percent volume. (probably encoding).
However I am also running a Freecom DVB-T stick which is detected by Ubuntu and all the channels are scanned. I get audio in Kaffine, but again no video.
There does not seem to be an option for x conversion setings like directed for Totem.
I am on my second webbook after the first had USB issues. The first one connected to wireless without issue. I have a problem with the one I have now. I carried out your LED fix, but the only option available in network icon at the top of the screen is manual configuration
Although my network is listed with DHCP connection, everytime I power on the webbook, it does not connect automatically to my wireless router.
It would appear under properties, my encryption key has doubled in length and, I have to delete and reenter my router password. I can then disconnect and reconnect to the router, that is until I end my session. If I do, I then have to re-enter my encryption key again as it adds more text to it.
Any assistance would be great.
I have dabbled in Linux prior to my webbook, but have limited command line experience in Linux
Regards
Gray
Hi Again
Further up this thread, you advised there was a USB recovery solution available, where would I get this. I trashed the Ubuntu install on my last webbook. (Before finding this forum) and got blank screen on reinstall. I then went to XP. I found your site and tried to do the recovery by CD as you advised in OEM install, but it did not work.
I would like to have the ability to recover if my first proper venture into Ubuntu is going to work.
(I have no choice as I no longer have a windows machine as I installed either Ubuntu or Kubuntu on all at home. Someone recently stole my debit card details online and plundered my account. So its a move to Linux for security reasons.
Are you also able to advise on a good mpeg encoder similar to divx for the webbook. (I do a lot of traveling and wish to use the webbook as mini media centre as well as a business tool.
Thanks again
Gray
I’ve been wondering if it’s at all possible to get a usb dvd rom to work on the webbook? I’ve had a quick look through some forums but can’t see anything. Are you aware of any that will work with Ubuntu that would allow someone to watch dvds that haven’t been ripped?
yes, any USB DVD drive should work just fine, but please bear in mind that playing DVDs has almost nothing to do with the drive working and is much more about encryption. I installed all the plugins and decss library on my webbook but I think I will rebuild it and start again so I can do some instructions on the steps you need to take. There is also region coding to consider, I think that does have something to do with the drive itself.