Mepis 8 Multimedia Problems Solved!
I finally figured out why Mepis 8 was playing a plan blue screen when watching videos. Even though I had all my codecs and system in full working order.
It’s rather simple! Or just plan stupid. Not sure which. And I’m also not sure who is at fault Mepis or the media player developers.
It seems that most of the media player developers have written those programs to run at a 24 color depth, and if the color depth is set to low, they just play a blue screen with great sound. And Mepis is installed at color depth 16 by default. So all it takes to get Mepis into full stream media compliance is to reset the color depth to 24.
No more blue screen media players!!!!
Now wasn’t that simple, or stupid on everybody part? Mine included.
I normally run my distros on 24 color depth, But then again, I don’t normally have to change them. So why does mepis have to upset my apple cart? By defaulting to a color depth that’s not normal.
On the other hand, why do the media player developers, build to play at one depth and not at others? Most videos are just 256 colors, so why do they build for color depth of 24 and not 16?
And my last big grip, It took several months of googleing off and on to even find the answer to this problem. And a lot of aguements on IRC channels about how I didn’t have something installed properly. I can’t believe I’m the only fool that this situation took for a long ride.
At any rate, due to this hiccup, I left Mepis behind and no longer use it as my main distro. Simply Because I had to have multimedia functions. Now I’m not a simpleton, nor a newbie. And yet this problem eluded me for several months. Just how many others tried mepis and went else where because of stupid simple mistakes such as this?
Or for that matter left linux all together because of lack in answers to simple fixes along these lines?
I don’t know if google will find this page for some future poor soul that is having that same problem but if it does. Here’s the fix!
After you’ve installed all the codecs you want and if Mepis is still just giving you a Blue Screen in you media player of choice. Then go to your xorg.conf file and change your color depth to 24, and restart your x server. That sould fix it for you. It did for all three of my installs.