ATI 5770 gpu, AMD 1055tx6 cpu. I was going to build an htpc running debian with xbmc on top (file and minecraft server in the background) but I am noticing now that whenever I play any video file. Be it off the hard drive or an actual dvd file I get a horizonal line kind of creep up my screen occasionally. Is a every so slightly blurred line. Some reading led me to compositing so I turned it off. Problem remains. What to do about this? Using proprietary fglrx for video card. Does this with vlc as well as other players that come with the install.

If you use the proprietary driver open the control center and enable the "Tear Free" option. This might solve your problem.

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Seems to have solved it. Am only in testing phases right now. Hope I don't have this issue with server hardware I'm getting. Not using AMD / ATI gfx.

Which hardware do you plan to get?

haswell pentium dual core (if it will play dvds well else i3), asrock h87 1150 mobo, 8gb ram, 128gb ssd for os / minecraft server, 2 1tb 5400rpm hdds for storage likely raid 1, seasonic psu, wireless pciexpress card and dvd drive of some sort.

started out as a headless minecraft / file server but figured why not combine it all into one machine.

forgot to mention, only 1tb storage as the whole of my media tops out at 300 gigs. plan on running only a 128gb ssd in my laptop so got plenty of room for backups as well.

Intel always had problems with tearing, but they have worked on that. I don't know how far they are with that, but it may be possible that you will have to install the latest kernel/driver combination.

planned on backporting latest 3.10-3 is whats in backports right now. worst case I will compile from scratch i guess. will i need to do gfx drivers seperately or is that in the kernel? i've been running ati / amd for years now so i'm new to anything intel really.

Parts of the driver are in the kernel, parts are in Mesa. I see no Mesa package in backports, so it may be possible that you will have to compile Mesa manually, but you should of course give the default package a try first. If no tearing appears you won't need to change it.