Easy workaround for mplayer bluescreen

[odegard]

For some reason, mplayer will turn all blue while the sound is running as normal after a while. There is a problem with xv, and one solution is to use -vo gl, -vo gl2 etc but for me all these are way to slow.

I read this somewhere, I've forgot where, but what you do is:

start playing the movie (blue)
start playing another instance of the movie (not blue!)
stop the first instance of the movie

et voila!

Now I don't have to restart X

[Da Fox]

if you're using XV that doesn't sound like something that would work, because when you start the first movie, it uses XV (which is what you want), but when you start the second movie the video overlay is in use, and thus it will fail to connect to the vx-port.
But then again, I've never had a blue screen with mplayer, and if this is a bug with XV it might work...
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[Merlin-TC]

As Da Fox said this doesn't really work.
Since the first player is blocking XV and then when you start a second instance it won't use XV but as fallback X11 which is not hardware accelerated.

[FormerSlacker]

Well I find that using the Nvidia control panel, reset to defaults button in XVideo section usually solves any XV problems.

I don't know what it is, but every couple of days my XV refuses to work, but reseting it always does the trick. Better then restarting the entire xserver

[odegard]

[Da Fox]

the second instance of mplayer will not wait for some other application (even mplayer itself) to release the XV port, it will simply tell you that it 'Could not find free Xvideo port - maybe another process is already using it.', and exit.

actual output when trying to run mplayer -vo xv twice: