When I recently uploaded videos to Youtube, I thought that there was something wrong with the actual videos because they looked green on my computer. Today I discovered that all videos play like that.
My first thought was that it was something wrong with ffmpeg. My second thought was compiz. My third thought was the switch between libsdl-debian-all and libsdl-debian-alsa that I had done to get Kdenlive working.
I tried it all. I still got green video.
Then I remembered: The videos looked green on-screen, but even after editing and re-encoding, once they got to Youtube they were fine. Could it be the graphics card drivers (which would explain the recent appearance of the problem, since I upgraded the drivers recently)?
I used the Screens And Graphics control panel to change the driver back to the open-source NV, and restarted X. Then I remembered that Screens And Graphics actually doesn’t do A DAMNED THING, and so I edited Xorg.conf manually. Restarted X. My videos looked fine again.
Playing with the settings in the Nvidia control panel hasn’t helped so far.
I have three choices: Suffer kernel panics with the old driver, suffer green video with the new driver, or suffer no 3D acceleration at all with the open-source driver.
Why the fuck do people say that the Nvidia drivers are better than the ATI ones? They really aren’t! Sure, I had to run XGL on my old computer, and for a while there the drivers used to crash whenever you logged-out or changed VT. But at least I never got random kernel panics or green video.
As a result, I am seriously considering that in future computers I build, I will use ATI cards or motherboards with integrated Intel graphics. If I don’t find a solution to this mess soon, I might yank the 8600 out of my computer and replace it with an ATI.
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