Movies lag and stutter after playing for a while

[abcdef]

Hello,

I'm new to LMDE, and have a recurrent problem with movie playback. I use the Cinnamon version.
Movies start playing fine when I open them in any media player. After a certain amount of time, which can vary, the movie starts stuttering and lagging so much that it becomes unwatchable. Closing and reopening the player does not help. Switching to another media player does not help either. The only remedy is to reboot, logging off does not help. Upon reboot, everything is back to normal, until it starts again. Having to reboot every 15 minutes to watch a movie is extremely frustrating.
I have noticed that some movies play back fine until the end. So far I cannot identify any common features: they use different codecs, with different resolutions and different file sizes. Yet some play fine, some do not.
I have tried many media players, among which VLC, banshee, totem, and mplayer. The problem exists with all of them. Mplayer sometimes display the message "your system is too SLOW", but not always. Movies can lag and stutter without the message being displayed.
Note that my computer is old. It's a 2005 laptop, with a 1.2 GHz centrino and 1GB RAM, intel graphics. But when using Windows, all movies play find in any media player. Using option -framedrop in mplayer doesn't help either.
Also note that I've installed many linux-based systems on the machine, including several debian and ubuntu distributions. The problem exists with all of them.

Consequently, I suppose that something is wrong either with the way X is configured, or with a coded, or my graphic driver. But in truth, I don't know. How can I diagnose the problem?

Note that I'm relatively new to the Linux world. I can do basic things, I know how to use the terminal, but that doesn't go much farther. I'll be happy to provide any information, config file, or whatever is needed to resolve the problem, and which is now lacking in this post, but I will need rather detailed explanations. In particular, I do not know how to configure X, or to check how it's currently configured, for that matter. Thank you for your patience.

EDIT: removed version number, which makes no sense with LMDE. That was a confusion on my part. I do use LMDE.

[killer de bug]

With only 1Gb of Ram, I would use MATE or XFCE but not Cinnamon.

Are you sure you use LMDE? LMDE has no number, if you use Linux Mint 17, this post is not in the right section of this forum.

[abcdef]

Thank you for your reply. Sorry, you are right - I do use LMDE, so there should be no version number mentioned. I'll edit my post if I still can.

Cinnamon works great on my machine. I have also tried XFCE and BlackBox derivatives. Haven't decided which one to use as default yet.
Movies stutter regardless of the desktop used.

[abcdef]

Hello,

Many web searches and much forum-scouring did not avail to much - I could find no information on that particular issue.
Because the problem occurs out of the box, and with many different distributions (both Ubuntu and Debian, and several sub-flavours were tested), I suspect this has something to do with codec or X configuration.
How do I check basic config. to rule that out?

Thank you.