I believe I’ve found another obscure bug. It seems to be OS-independent, but entirely hardware dependent, occuring only on AMD-based systems (but perhaps also Nvidia).
I have a short MPEG2 .VOB video clip which seems to play just fine except when I try to play it using anything (e.g. VLC or Kodi) which by default uses VDPAU hardware acceleration on an AMD-based system. (It plays just fine on my ARM TV box, e.g. under LibreELEC, but that ARM-based system has no HW acceleration for MPEG2.)
I’ve succeded at playing this clip using VLC under Ubuntu on my AMD-based system, but only when I first turn off the VDPAU HW acceleration in the VLC GUI.
Unfortunately, there no longer seems to be any way to tell Kodi to not use HW acceleration, e.g. for MPEG2, and it (Kodi) quite correctly thinks that MPEG2 HW acceleration is available on this specific (AMD) platform, so the result is that this clip, and indeed anything that came from the same DVD as this clip just won’t play properly with Kodi on any AMD system. (Kodi acts like it is playing the clip but the screen is all black. When VLC tries to play this same clip with VDPAU enabled on the same AMD-based system, the clip plays, but the video is a jumble of intensely greenish gibberish. When VDPAU HW acceleration is disabled, VLC plays the clip just fine on the same AMD hardware.)
This test clip is about 16MB and about 16 seconds long.
Who would be the best person to give a copy of this clip to? And how exactly should I get it to whoever might be willing to take a look at it? Should I be sending it as an email attachment? (That would be easiest for me, as I no longer have a personal FTP server that I can put it on.)
If anyone might like to look at this, then please PM me and send me the email address to which I should mail the clip.
P.S. I should say up front that this clip was derived from a .VOB file contained on a rather old DVD, and that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if it turned out that the MPEG2 material on that DVD wasn’t quite encoded perfectly. But to reiterate, it appears that any and all software MPEG2 decoders have no problem with it, and the MPEG2 stream within the clip only seems to be interacting badly… very badly… with VDPAU HW acceleration on AMD (and perhaps also on Nvidia, although I personally have no way to check that).