A toughie: MX4000 and Gentoo Stage 2

One of our corporate clients recently reported to us that 30 MX4000 video cards were not displaying video correctly. Video playback would be choppy and intermittent, and yet I cannot find anything to be wrong with these cards.

The systems are coin-driven electronic jukeboxes, running Zymeta. The core of these systems uses the following hardware configuration:

Asus A7N8X-VM
AMD Sempron 2600+ CPU
256MB PC2700
MSI GeForce4 MX4000

As mentioned in the title, they are using a customized version of a Gentoo Stage 2 install to load the Zymeta program. I have no clue what version the kernel is nor if they are using the Nvidia GLX driver. I don't even know what kind of video codec is used to play their advertising promo's. All I know is that I can take these video cards to any Windows XP system and play DVD's, XviD/DivX, and OGM files without having any problems.

The client blames the video cards, yet demands that a solution be found using Linux. Has anyone found such problems occuring in Gentoo with such a configuration?

It could be the video cards...although there is no way that 30 video cards are defective in the exact same way.

Possible hardware compatibility issue showing up in linux. I have seen systems run for days with XP and crash immediately trying to load a linux distro. When you sold these systems, I take it they have no software on them? What was your statement of warranty?

We didn't sell the systems, we just sold the video cards. I'm the RMA tester for the company that sold them, hence why I got involved in this ruckus. The problem is that the contact demands a solution, yet, is not knowledgable in the aspects of computer hardware. She blames the video cards, because she claims that they have replaced them with a new set and they work fine. Well, I can't prove that myself, because I have never seen them in my life.

I suppose I can try a Slackware install and see what happens. They locked me out of their little Gentoo configuration, but it's worth a shot.

fireluxx said:

We didn't sell the systems, we just sold the video cards. I'm the RMA tester for the company that sold them, hence why I got involved in this ruckus. The problem is that the contact demands a solution, yet, is not knowledgable in the aspects of computer hardware. She blames the video cards, because she claims that they have replaced them with a new set and they work fine. Well, I can't prove that myself, because I have never seen them in my life.

I suppose I can try a Slackware install and see what happens. They locked me out of their little Gentoo configuration, but it's worth a shot.

Click to expand...

test and tell them you found nothing electronically wrong (hardware wise) with the cards. if you need to prove it, run a couple of graphics tests on windows, switch to linux, find some other graphical programs, and show them that the GPU's have nothing wrong with them.

From what their engineer has told me, they are using MPEG-4 compression for their videos. The frame-loss is noticed at a resolution of 1280x1024. The frame-loss doesn't occur on the S-Video output, which I believe runs at 640x480 or 800x600. Could the system specs be a little worse for wear? I havn't figured out if they are using FFDShow, H.264, or XviD. If they are using H.264, that's what worries me the most.