Need Help with Linux Video and Skype

[Matt Graham]

From: Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It looks to me like video playback is sucking hard - esp. if Youtube
>> can crash it.  Are your video drivers set up correctly?
> Not sure how to check this

Post the output of "/sbin/lspci | grep VGA" as well as the output of "grep
Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf".  You may want to put your xorg.conf file up
somewhere and post a link to the mailing list so others can take a look.

>> What happens when you run glxgears at the command line?
> It ran ok
> mark at beagle:~$ glxgears
> 49 frames in 5.1 seconds =  9.638 FPS

That's NOT "ok".  It's downright horrible, but if you were running over ssh
-X, that's to be expected.  Very little hardware acceleration can happen when
you're running X11 over a network instead of directly.

>> Do you have the latest flash player?
> Probably not....don't use flash much.

Which version is it?  That may be important.

> I actually think there is an input problem. When I am connected through
> skype to another computer, the audio works fine and I can see the other
> person without any problem. No crashes. When I tell skype to turn on my
> camera, it does not turn on (no red light) and just crashes.

What (if anything) does "dmesg | tail -n40" say after a crash like that?  The
first thing I'd try in this situation is to replace the Debian-patched kernel
with a vanilla kernel, but I've just seen more weird bugs in distro-patched
kernels than in the vanilla ones.  Replacing a kernel is also a bit
intimidating if you've never done it before.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see