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

[Andrew]

Hi Ben!

Not sure if this helps... (semi-related). I had recently had grief with 
a fresh install of Ubuntu (10.10) on a i7 system with a high end Nvidia 
card.   The default kernel in 10.04 was okay - but once upgraded to the 
new kernel it was choppy and unusable.  I found many on various 
discussion boards with the same issue.

I am now running  2.6.36-020636-generic without any issues. (including 
full HD).


Cheers,


On 03/01/11 11:41, Ben Davies wrote:
>>> 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