I was reluctant to post this here since this is a weird issue and I doubt I'll find any solution to it.

Whenever I play a DVD in a Phonon-based player with the xine backend, it looks all pixelled (screenshot) as oppose to looking smooth like it does with other players (screenshot from KDE3 version of Kaffeine)

I am using Arch Linux's optimized KDEMod and I've encountered this problem on three separate computers, one with Intel video and two with Nvidia. When I booted into my Kubuntu Hardy install on my desktop machine, I saw that this problem existed there in KDE 4.1. I should install Karmic there and see if the problem still exists.

Does anyone else have this issue? Does anyone know what causes it, any solutions, etc?

I could use a different backend, but really xine is the most fully functional of the ones offered and it works fine for everything else.

Thanks!

Exact same problem here.

I use KDE 4.3.2 on Mandriva 2010.0 and recently switched from phonon-gstreamer to phonon-xine (missed the dvd menus ). Now DVDs look "blocky", no matter which phonon-based player I use (Kaffeine, Dragon Player). Using gxine or xine without a GUI (other than the integrated one) looks fine.

Of course I looked for video options of some kind (deinterlacing, post-processing...) but found none! Is it just me or can't phonon-xine be configured in any way? In Control Center->Computer Administration->Multimedia I can only choose a backend, not configure it, and neither Dragon Player nor Kaffeine seem to have any options (which seems weird, since the KDE3-Kaffeine had them).

Hope anyone can help, thanks in advance!

Yay! (well ok, I guess not). It's good to know I'm not alone, although this seems to be an odd problem because I doubt it's occurring for most people...

There must be something causing it. Do you have an Nvidia or Intel video card?

Yupp, Intel video card.
I have no idea how to track down this problem - it's obviously a bug in phonon-xine, since it doesn't occur when using phonon-gstreamer or xine alone...

Yeah, it must be. And I am gonna guess it only happens on Intel or Nvidia video cards... or rather, their drivers. I should try switching over to the generic nv driver on my machine and seeing what happens with it.

At least with extra info I can better report the bug.

However, one would think if my theory is correct, a lot more people would be having this issue.

If it does not occur with standard Xine, then it is unlikely to be graphics driver related.

Try replacing the file ~/.config/kde.org/Phonon-Xine.xine.conf with your appropriate xine.conf file.

Hmm... that seems like it should've worked, but it didn't, unfortunately. It's even weirder considering that both the Phonon-xine and the Xine config files weren't exactly the same, so that ought to have worked.

Regardless, here's both files.

xine config
phonon-xine config

I had no ~/.config/kde.org/Phonon-Xine.xine.conf on my system... however, copying my ~/.xine/config to this file didn't help.

So maybe this isn't just a configuration issue... or is there some other place where phonon looks for xine's config?

Those files are fine, the issue must lay in Phonon. I know it has some capabilities to alter the output stream.

I see... well, I suppose I should report it as a bug. I've held off until now because it looks like it doesn't effect most people.... or everyone just doesn't use Phonon o-o

It seems like Xine doesn't manage to load the XCB-enabled XV-output, and fall backs to the XSHM one.

Please file a bug with your distro, and ask them to check that they have all the build-time dependencies satisfied for Xine (Christophe Thommeret suggests libxcb-xv-dev as a likely missing candidate).

(You can also test with `xine -V xshm` to see if you get the same blocky output.)

Thanks to Christophe Thommeret for the ideas.

Thanks! I am actually using the Arch Linux, the same distro as you, I see. Except I'm using KDEMod/Chakra, so maybe it's something they've done. I shall try to compile Phonon-xine (perhaps the devel version) from the AUR and see if that works.

Anyway I tried running Xine with that command and DVD playback is fine. DVD playback works great with regular Xine video players; it only looks blocky with Phonon-xine.

Thanks for looking into this!

Sounds like you're right, `xine -V xshm` produces blocky output as well. However libxcb (+devel) is installed on my system, and so is libxcb-xv0 - but there is no dev-package for that one.

The dev packages need to be installed when building xine-lib.

I haven't had time to look into why it doesn't work on Arch yet, sorrry.

*nods* That's ok, it's not a really important thing for me. It's nice to know that someone who is a Chakra developer might be able to help me out, though