Made the switch, videos play poorly

[x9248]

So I switched from Vista to Kubuntu and most things are going great. Video playing, however, is more than crappy. Using VLC or mplayer (with smplayer GUI) there is obvious tearing in the video itself. I've tried googling but have not found a fix. At first I also had video flickering but I fixed that by disabling desktop effects. Now I'm left with tearing, and I need my videos! If I can't fix this I guess I'm going back to Vista :(

PS: Using "xv" output in smplayer, however tearing happens on all outputs. I've enabled the ATI driver when the warning about it popped up after my first boot up.

Wow 1 star rating already, grow up :rolleyes:

Edited February 6, 2009 by rpger81

[9UnknownMen]

Gotta love freetards. No help but they rate him low nonetheless. If VLC doesn't work off base install then somethings up. I'd say reinstall it or run it from the Live CD to see if it plays from there. If it does then defn re-install. Hopefully someone will help you out.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Gotta love freetards. No help but they rate him low nonetheless. If VLC doesn't work off base install then somethings up. I'd say reinstall it or run it from the Live CD to see if it plays from there. If it does then defn re-install. Hopefully someone will help you out.

"freetards"? Troll much? (N)

So I switched from Vista to Kubuntu and most things are going great. Video playing, however, is more than crappy. Using VLC or mplayer (with smplayer GUI) there is obvious tearing in the video itself. I've tried googling but have not found a fix. At first I also had video flickering but I fixed that by disabling desktop effects. Now I'm left with tearing, and I need my videos! If I can't fix this I guess I'm going back to Vista :(

PS: Using "xv" output in smplayer, however tearing happens on all outputs. I've enabled the ATI driver when the warning about it popped up after my first boot up.

Wow 1 star rating already, grow up :rolleyes:

Some people rate down any thread where "Linux" is mentioned. Just ignore the star ratings, I know that I don't pay attention to them.

Anyhow, you said you are using the ATI driver. Let's see if it is enabled. Post the output of the following line in a terminal:

glxinfo | grep rendering

(if you don't have your glx stuff installed, you may be prompted to try installing it first)

Not too sure about "xv", if that is the fallback lower-end video system or not. Someone more familar with mplayer may have to help you on that one.

Also, does it play OK when smaller like windowed? And only problems full-screen?

[x9248]

Anyhow, you said you are using the ATI driver. Let's see if it is enabled. Post the output of the following line in a terminal:

glxinfo | grep rendering

(if you don't have your glx stuff installed, you may be prompted to try installing it first)

Not too sure about "xv", if that is the fallback lower-end video system or not. Someone more familar with mplayer may have to help you on that one.

Also, does it play OK when smaller like windowed? And only problems full-screen?

Not sure if this is all it's supposed to say but this is all I got :p

adam@adam-desktop:~$ glxinfo | grep rendering

direct rendering: Yes

adam@adam-desktop:~$

The xv is the highest output, using hardware acceleration. #3 in FAQ here. I've also tried the lowest (among others), x11, yet tearing is still there. VLC is set to "default", I have no idea what the defualt would be but it also tears. Happens in both windowed and fullscreen.

[MrA]

Not too sure about "xv", if that is the fallback lower-end video system or not. Someone more familar with mplayer may have to help you on that one.

"xv" is the XVideo extension which is the normal (and accelerated) way to get video to the screen. It's what you should be using unless you have something way better (i.e. XVMC for MPEG2 playback, or VDPAU for new nVidia chips).

@OP: By tearing, I assume you mean that it's just display tearing, and you don't see any problems with decoding (your CPU can keep up with the video). If so, then it's probably not vsyncing. I can't help you much more since I'm not on Linux riht now and have no experience with ATI, but on nvidia chips, you can enable vsync for OpenGL and XV through the nvidia-settings program. There might be something comparable for your ATI chip.

[x9248]

Well it's a C2D and ATI 3650, not the best of things but plays HDTV transport streams flawlessly on Vista. In Linux decoding is fine, but the tearing is on everything... even on small DivX AVI files. The ATI Control Center is rubbish on my Linux, doesn't have nearly as many options as it did on Windows. It does have a "Wait for vertical refresh" option and I've tried it both on and off but no difference.

[MrA]

Well it's a C2D and ATI 3650, not the best of things but plays HDTV transport streams flawlessly on Vista. In Linux decoding is fine, but the tearing is on everything... even on small DivX AVI files. The ATI Control Center is rubbish on my Linux, doesn't have nearly as many options as it did on Windows. It does have a "Wait for vertical refresh" option and I've tried it both on and off but no difference.

Have you tried enabling that option and using the gl2 output in mplayer? That might work.

[Elv13]

Update your graphic driver, the left one did fix a lot of video player bugs, but accelerated video API is not availible yet to general public, ATI keep it in private beta for now, when they will add it to the official driver, performances will increase by neatly 1000% (if it is as good than when vidia introduced purevideo for Linux)

[x9248]

Have you tried enabling that option and using the gl2 output in mplayer? That might work.

This worked! So ATI set to vsync on and "gl2 yuv" (the normal gl very choppy framerate) works great. I also had to update smplayer from their website because when I first got it (apt-get) it gave me an older version without the gl yuv option. Thanks for the help!

[MrA]

This worked! So ATI set to vsync on and "gl2 yuv" (the normal gl very choppy framerate) works great. I also had to update smplayer from their website because when I first got it (apt-get) it gave me an older version without the gl yuv option. Thanks for the help!

No problem. It's stupid that you're not getting vsync on xv, but I guess it's true, ATI drivers SUCK!