Mike's Planet Just a Big Ball of Gas

16May/07Off

I’m So Blue

On my Macbook Pro, I noticed videos played though Totem had a blue hue to them. This seems to be a bug in gstreamer and how it works with the ATI fglrx drivers. It has been fixed upstream, but has not made it in Ubuntu yet. Here quick workaround, till a patch is released.

  1. Make sure gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is installed
  2. sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

  3. Run gstreamer-properties
  4. macbuntu:~$ gstreamer-properties

  5. Change the video output plugin to custom
  6. Change the video output pipeline to:
  7. ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)YV12 ! xvimagesink

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Filed under: Ubuntu Linux Comments Off
Comments (19) Trackbacks (1)
  1. Hi, great work thanks, i have this bug too on a Thinkpad/ATI setup.

    Unfortunately that didn’t work for me. My [Test] here fails with “Custom: could not link xvimagesink1 to ffmpegcsp1″ and the videos still apear with a blueish hue.

    Any packages i should install for this to work properly ?

  2. Try installing gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
    sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

  3. Hi, I was changing the Input part instead of the Output. Dohh! All worked fine as soon as i got that down. Great job/fix! Thanks a lot. I was really getting tired of the “blue people”.

  4. Great tip! ;-) thanks!-

  5. Thanks so much! Worked like a charm.

  6. In the middle of changing the pipeline value, I accidentally closed the window. Now on starting up, it core dumps:

    gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin ‘artsdsink’
    gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin ‘pulsesink’
    gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin ’sdlvideosink’
    Segmentation fault (core dumped)

    Reinstalling gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg makes no difference. Probably something needs cleaning up… any suggestions what/how?

  7. Right. A remove before the install fixed the core dump problem. Unfortunately, it did not fix the blue hue problem. The “test” seems to bring up colours OK. Any suggestions?

  8. Thank you so much! That color thing has been driving me nuts for a long time! Worked great in Feisty.

  9. Oh spot on! Not sure about the problem description though. It looked to me as though red and blue were swapped. That’s what I searched for anyway, so now maybe the next person will find this! The fix doesn’t look obvious to me, any chance of more info (or a link) on how the fix was discovered? Thanks!

  10. Thank you a lot ! Works like a charm :) Thanks again !!

  11. works like a charm, make sure that you change back your colors that you were messing with once you type it in though. one more note though, it seems that that package (sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg) is installed now on feisty, or at least currently unnecessary. but it does look as though this is a confliction with fglrx.

  12. Great tutorial, Mike. Can you explain why this fixes it?

  13. Yoh!!
    Great tip, it worked out like a charm for Feisty, but has i upgraded to hardy heron it mushed up di video, so i rolled back to automatic and everything plugs again..
    irie
    gio

  14. Thanks but the fix does not appear to work for me at least. made all the changes and the color remained the same, predominantly blue or a dead red channel. The only way I can get the video back to “normal” is by rebooting. BTW, I am running Hardy Herron and a Dell 530n with Nvideo GT8600 card and nvidia drivers.

    I have found that if I run VLC everything seems ok, but if I then run mplayer, this causes the blue hue. Actually it really appears as if the green and red channel are dead.

  15. Hi RedHat,

    I had the same problem. I used this line instead of the above one:
    videobalance hue=-1 ! autovideosink

    Nothing like a good home-brew hack :D

  16. Peitschie, videobalance hue=-1 ! autovideosink works great! Appearantly it even solved a problem mplayer had about slow videos!
    But it only solved mplayer’s problem and kaffein is still blue… Any suggestions?

  17. Oh, back to blue and green again…

  18. Seems to be caused by MythTV, which changes the hue settings for videos. I uninstalled it and fixed the hue settings in MPlayers back to default. Fingers crossed it will stay fixed…

  19. Nope happened again even though MythTV is removed…


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