aviplay bug: hangs during initialization

Hello,

Aviplay's the best video player out there, but for years I've been living
with some problems with it which mean that I must go through an elaborate
ritual to get videos playing.

Aviplay hangs on init, and I have to dump core to get out.  Some
errors are:

<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_COLORKEY  GS   <0, 16777215> = 66046
Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x84)!

or a bit further:

<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_COLORKEY  GS   <0, 16777215> = 66046
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_BRIGHTNESS  GS   <-128, 127> = -17
Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x86)!

or further still:

<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_COLORKEY  GS   <0, 16777215> = 66046
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_BRIGHTNESS  GS   <-128, 127> = 18874372
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_CONTRAST  GS   <0, 255> = 74
X Error: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter) 5
   Major opcode:  141
   Minor opcode:  14
   Resource id:  0xffffffef

or a little more:

<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_COLORKEY  GS   <0, 16777215> = 66046
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_BRIGHTNESS  GS   <-128, 127> = -17
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_CONTRAST  GS   <0, 255> = 18874372
<renderer> : XV attribute: XV_DOUBLE_BUFFER  GS   <0, 1> = 76
X Error: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) 8
   Major opcode:  141
   Minor opcode:  14
   Resource id:  0xa0


I'm able to get the file playing by some combination of waiting (for
some unspecified timeout), running xawtv, and running MPlayer,
but I haven't tracked down exactly what stops aviplay hanging, and
some of these are surely just superstitions.  My feeling is there is
some bad state that xawtv and/or aviplay leaves V4L in, and this is reset
by either some timeout or by running MPlayer.  Interestingly if I
want to use glav (lavplay) i usually first have to get aviplay working
or else it will similarly not play or show just a blue box.

Then if I get aviplay playing, often the video is extremely dark
and I have to try again.

I'm using a G400 card and am trying to play MJPEG files under
Linux 2.4.22/XFree 4.3.0.

(Other problems with DivX:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x0000000f in ?? ()
#1  0x4148f75c in avm::DIVX_VideoDecoder::Start() () from /usr/lib/avifile-0.7/divx4.so
#2  0x00000120 in ?? ()
Cannot access memory at address 0x160

)


Mark