Strange display bug after running Color and Quicktime...

Question

Level 1

15 points

Strange display bug after running Color and Quicktime...

Hi guys,

I've noticed that after running Color and then after running QT (to play back a movie), sometimes my display gets garbled and the screen becomes full of randomly colored triangles. I've managed to take a screenshot of one of these crashes:

http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/7971/picture5gk9.png

Does anyone know what this is and how to prevent it? I run 10.5.6 with latest Color/FCS2 updates.

My graphics specs:

Chipset Model: ATY,RadeonX1600
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)

Thanks!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 2, 2009 4:36 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 2, 2009 6:13 PM in response to nick-b

What format are your source files? Where are these files stored?

Does this "crash" occur when you switch back to Color after stopping playback in Quicktime Player?

I've never used Color on my MBP, but have never encountered a crash like this before. You're going to have to provide some more specifics, and maybe a crash log of some sort. What exactly are you doing in Color before you switch apps?

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Answer 2

nick-b Author

Level 1

15 points

Jan 2, 2009 10:35 PM in response to Michael Trauffer

Hi Michael!

Files that I'm playing back in QT are Divx (avi) or x.264 files. I've never seen this bug before I started to use Color on a project so I'm assuming it is the culprit. I've seen it happen twice so far. I'd start Color... work in it and then later on, while playing back a totally different movie, it would show a video garbled like that. It would only do it while playing video and it would happen no matter which video I played. It looks to me like some video driver error that gets triggered by some feature that QT or video playback (say VLC) triggers.

Nothing really crashes in a normal sense... I don't get a crash box or kernel panic. I can still work in OS X but the video problems where the apps are updating UI are all messed up. Only a quick Expose fixes the things and clears the errors beriefly. The only 'fix' is a restart.

Not sure what more I could provide... maybe I should monitor log files next time this happens and see if there's anything there?

I'll try to get more data next time this happens.

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Answer 3

JP Owens

Level 4

2,015 points

Jan 3, 2009 11:44 AM in response to nick-b

COLOR doesn't play nice with other applications. It reserves a lot of resources for itself and doesn't share. My first guess is that there is a conflict in the video decoders garbling the screen display -- especially if its a foreign/unsupported codec/format to COLOR. This doesn't happen to multi-core towers very often, but my bet is that a resource-strapped laptop isn't going to have the real estate or GPU that will allow COLOR and Quicktime to co-exist, especially with wildly different graphics display requirements. AVI and H264 are totally unknown to COLOR.

jPo

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Answer 4

Jan 5, 2009 1:46 PM in response to nick-b

The QT components installed to read those Divx files may very well be the culprits.

You might try removing them before opening Color and then putting them back to play back those Divx movies.

As Michael said, Color (and the Pro Apps generally) get very touchy with some of these 3rd party quicktime components.

HTH

- pi

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