Many issues with xfce 4.2 rc1 & compositing

[Piotr Chmura]

Dnia Thu, 18 Nov 2004 23:15:38 +0500, Алексей Иванов  
<lexx at orenburg.rfn.ru> napisał:

> Hi!
>
> I have a problem with running mplayer under xfce 4.2 rc1 with  
> compositing switched on. When I press "F" to bring picture into  
> fullscreen it runs with many artifacts. The screen flickers. I see some  
> black spots (one is located on screen exactly in place of XMMS main  
> window even though it's being run on another virtual screen). And I very  
> often have to press "F" for several times to make fullscreen picture  
> visible (if I don't do several presses of "F" button I see only black  
> screen :(( ). And I see the same even in windowed mode often.
> Compositing generally seems to be ..err.. not good?. If I send some  
> moving picture to the desktop (xwininfo and a click on desktop gives  
> window-id (by the way, can it be done automatically without clicking?),  
> then I use it with "mplayer -wid $window-id foo.avi" or  
> "/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/blocktube -wireframe -window-id 0x1000003  
> -visual GL") it makes flicker _everything_ - main bar, taskbar, all  
> windows :(
> What should I do?
>
> Some (probably) usefull info.
> I run fully installed Slackware 10.0 on PIII 800MHz, 256Mb RAM, noname  
> Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 440.
> Manually built MPlayer 1.0pre5-3.3.4 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

are you using nvidia driver ??

it isn't xfce problem... :-)

Maybe I shouldn't paste it here... but... it's your lucky day ;-)
 from nvidia's README.txt file:

__________________________________________________________________________

(app-u)  APPENDIX U: THE COMPOSITE X EXTENSION
__________________________________________________________________________

X.org version X11R6.8.0 contains experimental support for a new X protocol
extension called Composite.  This extension allows windows to be drawn into
pixmaps instead of directly onto the screen.  In conjuction with the DAMAGE
and RENDER extensions, this allows a program called a composite manager to
blend windows together to draw the screen.

Performance can be improved by enabling 'Option "RenderAccel"' in
xorg.conf.  See (app-d) APPENDIX D: X CONFIG OPTIONS for more details.

Full Composite support will require additional driver support.  Currently,
direct rendering clients such as GLX have no way of knowing that they are
supposed to render into a pixmap, and will draw directly to the screen
instead.  We are currently investigating what is necessary for such clients
to interoperate seamlessly with Composite.  In the meantime, GLX will be
disabled by default when the Composite extension is detected.  An option
has been provided to re-enable it.  See 'Option "AllowGLXWithComposite"' in
(app-d) APPENDIX D: X CONFIG OPTIONS.

This issue was discussed on the xorg mailing list:

     http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2004-May/000607.html

Composite also causes problems with other driver components:

   o Xv cannot draw into pixmaps that have been redirected offscreen and
     will draw directly onto the screen instead.  For some programs you can
     work around this issue by using an alternative video driver.  For
     example, "mplayer -vo x11" will work correctly, as will "xine -V xshm".
     If you wish to use Xv, you can simply disable the compositing manager
     and re-enable it when you are finished.

   o Workstation overlays are incompatible with Composite.

More information about Composite can be found at
http://freedesktop.org/Software/CompositeExt


i hope it helps :-)

>
> Thank you for reading this stuff :) I hope it can be fixed without much  
> pain :))
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