Hi people
Why am i experiencing choppy videos in all the players I use ... Like VLC, SMplayer, Totem .... ect ... ??? is there something wrong with the video card drivers?? or am i using the wrong streamer??? or some wrong settings??help pls

What are you using? Are you using a PC, a TIVO, a handphone, a MAC,an XBOX, or a PS3? You using Windows, Windows CE, Linux, or Unix? What graphic hardware you have? What drivers did you install?

You cant just scream out your problem in SMS style & grammar and expect people to give you a magical answer.

switch to Windows or Mac.

Yeah Ubuntu 8.04 got problem with multimedia stuff like video and audio.
My case is i cant use the other multimedia software after one. It will cause the whole laptop hang and could not press even any of the key. Only power button you can press. Haiz... I still cant figure out what happen. But i think it should be the sound problem, which is the alsa thinggy. So the solution that im having now is just like jasonkwk said switch to window or mac. Sad case.....

From my experience, choppy/jerky video playing usually caused by this 2 reason:
1. wrongly kernel configuration (Try different kernel)
2. 32 bit hard disk I/O support disabled. (you can check using hdparm)

From my experience, watching videos on Ubuntu has always been choppy as far as I can remember. On my 1.6 GHz Intel Core Duo + Intel 945 integrated graphics, playback on Windows has been smooth against the choppiness on Ubuntu, especially on HD videos.

Haven't found ways to smooth it out.

It is because of the video output method (renderer).

Open a terminal and run "gstreamer-properties".

Choose your video output as XV for hardware acceleration (using GPU), or no-XV for CPU rendered videos. This only applies for gstreamer based players like xine, totem, and gxine.

For VLC and Mplayer you need to toy around with the settings within to choose the renderer. But the concept is the same, choose the best renderer.

no-XV will use CPU, but is ugly and choppy on less powerful systems.

XV will use the GPU to do the work, and is pretty and smooth. This is great if you use a decent graphic card, but will cause layer issues (only for ATI/intel users) if you are using Compiz. But if you use NVidia, this is the best choice.

Bottomline, NVidia is handsdown the best choice for Linux users.

This post has been edited by ZDemon: Aug 29 2008, 01:06 AM

Brilliant tip. With the XV option movies play a lot better on Totem and the HD movies doesn't stutter. All this on a lowly Intel integrated GPU. Thanks a lot!

I have Found it .... its probably My ATI driver which is messing up my video rendering ....well try installing this
sudo apt-get install envyng-core envyng-gtk
after installing go applications and select system tool ... the rest are self explainatary

Nothing wrong with mine even on full screen......I use Nvidia which works much better, I used to have problems with ATI gpu. Plenty of codec to install from repository regardless.
For Ubuntu go get an Nvidia, perhaps from the buy&sell forum, it's pretty decent price.


This post has been edited by baby26: Sep 5 2008, 03:28 AM

Easy to say but need lot of thing. Money, time.

This post has been edited by Kiemi: Sep 7 2008, 11:04 PM

hi guys,
i am new in ubuntu, may i know how to install a multimedia player?
the integrated player cant play RMVB file.
thx

Go to the packet manager and install "ubuntu-restricted-extras".

If you want other players, you can try vlc, mplayer, and xine-ui.

this one is the best.
it will install java,codecs, flash and etc.