Intel XVideo problems following Mythbuntu 9.10 upgrade

Following an upgrade to Mythbuntu 9.10, one of my MythTV frontends failed play back video smoothly and without stuttering. The frontend is a rather old Pentium IIIM/i830M based Asus laptop but it played SD resolution video quite acceptably before the upgrade.

The mythfrontend.log revealed that the problem was that the driver no longer possessed the XVideo extension capability.

   VideoOutputXv Error: Could not find suitable XVideo surface.
   VideoOutputXv: Falling back to X11 video output over a network socket.
         *** May be very slow ***

No kidding. After much Googling of the Ubuntu forums I found a link to the solution in the Ubuntu 9.10 release notes. The trick is to disable kernel-mode-setting (KMS) using the nomodeset kernel boot option.

posted by James Gemmell on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 at 13:54 | permalink | tags: linux, mythbuntu, mythtv