Bug#857552: i965-va-driver: failing to play videos (stops half-way through)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

[off-topic for this bugreport, separate response later, much
appreciated the advice on mpv nicholas!]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:03 PM, Nicholas D Steeves <nsteeves at gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed something strange in the original bug report:
>
>> > > On 2017-03-12 13:31:24, lkcl wrote:
>> > >> Package: i965-va-driver
>> > >> Severity: important
>> > >> Tags: upstream
>> > >>
>> > >> -- System Information:
>> > >> Debian Release: 7.4
>> > >>   APT prefers testing
>> > >>   APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
>> > >> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
>> > >> Foreign Architectures: i386
>
> Debian Release: 7.4 with i965-va-driver and kernel from Debian 9?
>
> Luke, I think your base-files needs to be upgraded ;-) Out of
> curiousity, does (as root) "echo n | apt-get dist-upgrade" want to
> upgrade anything?

 it's down to unusual circumstances (constant travel being one of
them).  i run with debian/testing, always have done, and, amazingly,
it works really well.  what's needed gets pulled in on an ad-hoc basis
through "apt-get install {arbitrary package}".  every few years i do a
hardware upgrade: i do a copy of the laptop's hard drive to the new
hard drive, and have repeated that about... errr... four times now :)

 basically i have far too much on here to risk doing anything else.
millions of files, software dating back 10 years.  i use fvwm2 which
is remaining "timeless" and doesn't have the context/snapshot-critical
dependencies that other desktops have.

 it's pretty unusual but works very very well... and is necessary to
minimise the risk of losing the only development machine that i have.

 :)