[clug] Choppy video on Dell XPS laptop / Ubuntu 10.04 (linux Digest, Vol 97, Issue 1, Message 1)

[Ben Davies]

>> I'm having a problem with choppy video playback, so was wondering if anyone has
>> any ideas.
>>
>> I was trying to play a full HD/H264 codec video on a Dell Intel Core2 Duo 2GHz
> ...
>
>    Hm, What kind of graphics device does the laptop have? I would have
> expected that the XPS series of laptops have discrete NVIDIA or
> ATI/AMD  graphics devices. But you never know, you might have an
> "integrated" (or "less discrete") Intel "GMAxxx" graphics device.

Ooops, forgot to add the graphics card specs before :(

The system is a XPS M1330, with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS & with 128mb of GDDR3 
memory. I've been using the NVIDIA binary driver (version according to synaptic 
is 195.36.24-0ubuntu1~10.04), which gives the same choppy result.


IIRC, it isn't limited to HD content either, once or twice I've had really 
choppy playback on smaller, lower res video. I'd post the link but it has been 
removed: the production company seems to had it up for a limited time. For some 
basic tests, I tried some HD demo vids (~3 mins) and these worked fine.


>    If you've got the much more likely discrete graphics, they should be
> physically able to do HD content, however you'll need to ensure you
> have the blessed appropriate XV/XVMC module loaded (run xdpyinfo and
> look for the "XVideo" extension or run xvinfo and see what that tells
> you)

xdpyinfo reports that the XVideo extension is present :-)


cheers,


Ben