Unable to play full-screen video when too many windows are open

[Vortex]

Hi,

using the latest nvidia driver (180.11) and compiz the video window of video players turns black once you resize it past a certain size or put the video in full screen. This only happens when there are too many open windows.
I tried mplayer and gstreamer using the "xv" and "gl" output drivers for mplayer and "xvimagesink" for gstreamer.

While the video window remains black, the application logs the following:

X Error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation) 11
  Extension:    141 (Uknown extension)
  Minor opcode: 19 (Unknown request)
  Resource id:  0x160000a

Closing or minimizing some windows restores video playback. Large and complex windows like firefox seem to take up more resources, but the problem usually occurs as soon as there are more than 3 or 4 windows showing.

This only happens while running compiz. The kde4 compositing manager, for example, does not suffer from this problem. However, this problem did not occur in older nvidia driver versions (pre 177.xx if I remember correctly).

I have attached an nvidia-bug-report.

Does anyone else suffer from this problem? Is it possible to tweak my compiz or nvidia settings to make it work again?

[Dâniel Fraga]

I have the same issue and guess what: I use a 7600GT too!

[LostinSpacetime]

This might be related to the famous "black window bug" which is probably not solved entirely. If you have 128MB VRAM, then it's pretty sure the case.

[Vortex]

The card has 256MB of VRAM. I don't have any other problems with black windows either. It seems to be just video playback that is not working.

[LostinSpacetime]

If you turn the blur plugin on in compiz, is it getting worse? You also have to add "any" in the field for "Alpha blur windows".

[AaronP]

Unlike other X rendering, there are no software fallbacks for Xv (you probably wouldn't want them anyway, they'd be too slow) so the driver has to do its best to make sure your window is in memory that the GPU can render to. However, if your memory is chock-full of other windows, Compiz's blur buffers, etc., it can't do that and you get BadAlloc.

[LostinSpacetime]

OK, then this is it. For the case you have turned on triple buffering, I believe it might help if you turn it off or even turn off the driver sync to vblank entirely. The compiz sync to vblank does a pretty good job in most situation I think.

[dap]

This is my problem too on my GeForce 7600 GS (256M RAM).

Is there a way to see what consume the texture memory?

If I switch to another VT and back / restart compiz with --replace / kill some windows, then I can play videos with XV for a while (about 5 minutes). ALT+TAB in compiz is much slower when the XV doesn't work (mipmap disabled). KDE 4.2, 5 firefox window (2-3 tabs in each of them), 1 xchat, 1 kwrite, 5-10 terminals and no XV video.

I'm running Fedora 11 (Xorg 1.6.1.901, Nvidia driver 85.18.14), I have never seen this problem before on my Fedora 9 (Xorg 1.5.2, Nvidia driver 177.82). Something big has been changed about video memory management or some application eats much more? (I mostly using the same apps)