Having video playback issues, wat do?

[Lyndis]

Regardless of the medium (online streaming, VLC, whatever), pretty much any video >360p will chop up to the point that it's unwatchable. Granted, my computer has never played high-def well to begin with, but I've never had problems up to 720p as long as nothing particularly intensive is also running. Is Mint just more of a resource hog than XP?

I've never used Linux before so I really know nothing about anything, but I figured I would give it a shot and install the proprietary ATI driver off of AMD's website. This helped, sort of, but also brought on a whole different slew of graphical anomalies (wrong splash screen on boot, absence of any OS animation, drivers not even recognised; Catalyst Control Centre does not work) and I don't know how to undo it short of reinstalling the root directory. What do, guys?

For reference, my GPU is a Radeon 92xx series card. I'm running a stock Dell Dimension 3000 machine.

[daemox]

Is Mint just more of a resource hog than XP?

Nope, most likely it's going to come down to driver/hardware support.

ATI's GNU/Linux drivers are less mature than Nvidia's. Their hardware decoding is also less well supported in general. Nvidia's hardware decoding (VDPAU) is supported in most media players at this point and Linux Mint has supported it since version 8 (if not before).

If you're looking to play HD content reliably, a GPU upgrade/swap to an Nvidia card might be the most hassle free approach for you. I was in this same position a few years back, and haven't regretted spending the money or making the switch for one moment since then (and have just recently upgraded again)!

For HD playback, you don't need a fast card just ideally a new(er) edition (chipset) one. Depending on if your motherboard supports AGP or PCI-E you'll have different options (it'll be slim pickings if you're still on AGP). This may not be the route, you were looking to go when posting this. But with hindsight, and a fair amount of experience in this realm, this is the direction I'd recommend for the least hassle over the long term.

Cheers!

[remoulder]

proprietary ATI driver...92xx series

There is no proprietary ATI driver available for your card in newer versions of mint and attempting to install one will fail but leave problems behind. Run synaptic and look for fglrx, fglrx-cccle and fglrx-kernel-source. If any of these are installed, right mouse and select for complete removal, then click Apply. Also delete any /etc/X11/xorg.conf file you have - you need to do this as root.