screen blacks out for about 5 seconds on video playback

[ej8899]

Mint 19 with Cin. 3.8.9 on an i5 Acer Timeline 3820 laptop - it's a fairly old laptop.. but still running great - especially with Mint on it. One thing I can't figure out though, is why the screen goes black for about 5 seconds (sometimes less I think) when I start a video (doesn't matter what player). Really I don't need to start a video - just open the player itself (VLC & Mint supplied X-Player). I saw this happening when going to a particular menu setting too (can't find it again to duplicate).

I'm fully updated and driver manager shows nothing else either. Video driver is AMD 5470 with 512mb ram. System - as mentioned, i5 with 8gb ram and a 256gb ssd. Any ideas? I don't really feel like going through a significant troubleshooting experience as it's just a 'minor' thing -- but the more I do use the system, the more it becomes annoying.

[Hoser Rob]

Does it matter what type of video? Eg. HD or SD, xvid or HEVC? Have you tried enabling frame drop in the media players?

The memory stats etc don't change the fact that an AMD 5470 is a legacy card. There's only one driver for it and AMD legacy support is spotty at best. I wouldn't install 19 ... recent Linux releases have been cutting old hardware support and all distros are affected ... or the Cinnamon DE. Xfce or Mate would work a lot better.

You should also post more complete system info always, copy/paste this to the terminal and copy/paste the text output here:

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxz