I have had the problem with v7174 driver. When I have it next time, I'll try to debug more.
Me too, I've grabbed the output of xvinfo and it seems normal, so I suspect after I've next restarted there won't be any difference - AFAIK, xvinfo only reports the card's capabilities, not its current state.
Try to get xvinfo output BEFORE failure and AFTER. I suspect some memory leak in driver code, try to open large movie, maybe it will lead to failure faster?
I don't think it's the size of the movie that matters, because the driver only ever sees a few frames at a time regardless of the movie size (I've repeatedly played a 13GB digital TV stream without trouble...) Interestingly enough, after perusing the output of xvinfo it lists alternate ports - the "NV17 Video Overlay" which I normally use is port 177 and this is the one that no longer works, but my secondary monitor plays video with the "NV17 Video Texture". My primary display also supports this 'video texture' as port 178 and if I run mplayer like this: mplayer -vo xv:port=178 ... Then I get video output! Presumably it's not quite as accelerated, but it's a *lot* faster than the -vo gl variants. Looks like this'll be a viable workaround until the problem is fixed. Cheers, Adam.