Video Playback

[ZaZ]

Anyone got a tips for smooth video playback? I've got some DVD and Blu-ray rips that mostly work good, but I'm getting some tearing and occasionally some stutter. So far I've just disabled compiz to try to fix it, but that didn't help. I noticed the same behavior in VLC and mplayer. Thanks for any help.

[H.A.L. 9000]

Anyone got a tips for smooth video playback? I've got some DVD and Blu-ray rips that mostly work good, but I'm getting some tearing and occasionally some stutter. So far I've just disabled compiz to try to fix it, but that didn't help. I noticed the same behavior in VLC and mplayer. Thanks for any help.

If you have ATI, look in the CCC in preferences for "Enable Tear Free Desktop".

It worked for me.

[Ayle]

If you have ATI, look in the CCC in preferences for "Enable Tear Free Desktop".

It worked for me.

I didn't know about the Tear Free Desktop so I just forced Vsync, no more tearing.

[ZaZ]

I tried the no tear, but it worked a little too good. Now I got no video at all.

[H.A.L. 9000]

I didn't know about the Tear Free Desktop so I just forced Vsync, no more tearing.

How do you manually force Vsync?

I tried the no tear, but it worked a little too good. Now I got no video at all.

Sorry. Which driver were you on? The one supplied by Ubuntu? Or the proprietary one (downloaded from ATI)?

[ZaZ]

There's no need to be sorry. It was worth a shot. I'm using proprietary drivers from AMD. I had a nVidia card in there, but that wasn't working too good either. I thought I'd try my AMD card to see if it was any better, but they seem about the same.

[TuxDude]

In VLC there is an option to choose which video backend should be used for video decoding and rendering. There would usually be a long list around 10+ (in my case at least), I usually try with various backends and see which works the best.

I usually experienced tearing on my laptop(which has an old Core 2 Duo) while decoing 720p or 1080i but I was able to get rid of it by using the hardware accelerated option (xgl or something like that).

There might be similar settings in other players as well.

Enabling Vysnc is also a good idea to have a smooth picture - but I usually havent observed any difference in enabling/disabling vsync on the 2 PCs and one laptop I commonly use.

[naticus]

Use synaptic and download ffmpeg-mt, it is the multi-threaded version of the ffmpeg codec that handles video encoded in x264. It should double your performance.

[ZaZ]

Thanks naticus, that did seem to help some, but I'm still not where I need to be. Would I better off going back to nVidia? Everyone keeps telling me it's better, but they seem to be about the same to me.

I'm not familiar with the back end. How would I go about finding it? Thanks.

[naticus]

Thanks naticus, that did seem to help some, but I'm still not where I need to be. Would I better off going back to nVidia? Everyone keeps telling me it's better, but they seem to be about the same to me.

I'm not familiar with the back end. How would I go about finding it? Thanks.

right, so you have the codecs now you need the player. You need mplayer and it's frontend smplayer. You have mint, so I assume mint11 or mint lmde, type this:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

sudo apt-get install smplayer.

When you run smplayer go to:

Options>General>Video>Video output (make sure it is 'user defined' and the field be 'xv,' without the qoutations.

now go to :

'Performance' tab on the left of the same options (that you were in previously)

now click on the 'up' arrow for "threads for decoding" and make it '2'.

loop filter should be 'enabled'.


* this is all after you have ffmpeg-mt, and mplayer with the smplayer frontend installed.

good luck mate.