Slow and jerky video playback!

[frisil]

Hi,
I really like Mint Julia a lot and want to keep it on my living room PC. All seemed fine until I tried to play a 720p divx avi. It's a slideshow, really, no motion at all! Other movies are a little jerky, but okay. I use a Geforce 6200 graphic card (okay, it's not the newest computer) and enabled the driver from the hardware section, compiz with effects runs fine. Video playback does not get any better if I disable desktop effects. Something is very wrong here and this is a showstopper, being able to watch high definition movies is a sine qua non for a living room PC. Don't tell me my hardware is too weak because Pardus 2008 on another partition plays back fine!

What can I do? I really want to keep Mint, but the way it is that's not possible!

[kwevej]

first, try mplayer

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mplayer -vo x11 SomeVideo.avi

if it doesn't help you can make a benchmark, and select the best video output driver:

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mplayer -vo x11 -nosound -benchmark -frames 1000 SomeVideo.avi

try different video outputs:

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mplayer -vo xv -nosound -benchmark -frames 1000 SomeVideo.avi

etc...
the output will be something alike:

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  BENCHMARKs: VC:   5.245s VO:   1.051s A:   0.000s Sys:   0.273s =    6.569s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 79.8375% VO: 16.0004% A:  0.0000% Sys:  4.1621% = 100.0000%

watch the number second line from the bottom (6.569s in this case)
the lower number the better

you can choose from

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	vdpau	VDPAU with X11
	xv	X11/Xv
	gl_nosw	OpenGL no software rendering
	x11	X11 ( XImage/Shm )
	xover	General X11 driver for overlay capable video output drivers
	gl	OpenGL
	gl2	X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
	dga	DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
	ggi	General Graphics Interface (GGI) output
	fbdev	Framebuffer Device
	fbdev2	Framebuffer Device
	svga	SVGAlib
	matrixview	MatrixView (OpenGL)
	aa	AAlib
	v4l2	V4L2 MPEG Video Decoder Output
	xvidix	X11 (VIDIX)
	cvidix	console VIDIX

later, you can make the 'settings' permanent, and use them with the GUI one, gnome-mplayer

[frisil]

Thanks, but I found the true culprit via 'top': Unbelievable, but it's the small Impulse-screenlet! I have no idea why this tiny thing slows down video playback a lot, but it does! When I kill it, videos run smoothly.