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VLC displays black screen when playing DVD video under Xubuntu 20.04

This afternoon we were refurbishing an older AMD Phenom II X6-based computer and we ran into an issue that when we put a DVD into the drive VLC would open up and start to play, but we only saw black in the VLC window. The video was definitely playing, but VLC wasn't displaying anything.

Video is visible if you disable Hardware Accelerated Decoding in VLC:

VLC > Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs Settings

Hardware-accelerated decoding > Disable

 We're not sure if this is an issue strictly related to a bug in VLC since when we opened the video with Parole Media player it played just fine (no adjustments needed).

In our case this happened with a Radeon 7950HD Twin Frozr 3GB/OC video card. If you have one of these cards, are running some flavour of Ubuntu, and experience this or a similar issue please leave a comment below.

We also tested Xonotic using Phoronix Test Suite and it seemed to run pretty quickly.


For the curious, the system has the following physical specifications:

  • ASUS M5A97 motherboard
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1055T CPU (6 cores, 6 threads at a base clock of 2.8GHz, turboing up to 3.3GHz)
  • 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
  • 1TB Western Digital Black hard drive
  • MSI 3GB Twin Frozr/OC AMD Radeon HD 7950 video card
  • A slightly customized installation of Xubuntu 20.04 with additional software (Steam and a few other extra applications)
  • A very nice Deepcool Tesseract BR white case with a blue fan on the back.

Prices for used video cards, particularly anything 2GB or above, are still crazy, and not where they should be. It's extremely rare that our project sees a video card above 1GB, and quite a few of our 1GB cards are the less impressive GDDR3 cards. So when we get a nice card like the MSI Twin Frozr 3GB/OC Radeon HD 7950 it adds a fair amount of value to whatever machine it's in.

The other part of the equation is the power supply necessary to drive the card. In this case there is a Corsair 550W power supply. While we do occasionally get 550W or even 600W power supplies, the vast majority of the time the PSU's test bad.

We really like the Deepcool Tesseract BR case on this computer. The case has a couple of slots for 2.5" drives and a couple of slots for 3.5" drives. The case is easy to work in, has a nice clear insert in the side panel, and some cable management hooks on the back. Cases that support optical drives are getting more difficult to find, and this is just about the nicest case I've seen in awhile that supports optical drives.

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