Need info on improving video playback in Ubuntu

wb7sdxgary · 01-10-2009, 10:29 PM

Hi, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04LTS. I have over 200g free space on my sata drive. I am using the MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard with an AMD 5000+ cpu and I have 2g of ram DDR800. The video card is the pcie 512mb Asus EN8400GS Silent. I just need help trying to make movies, trailers, youtube, and any other video play without stopping. Thanks for any help. I just thought this system should be able to play almost any video or movie I came across. Gary

Simon Bridge · 01-11-2009, 08:29 AM

Your system is technically capable of playing a wide variety of non-DRM, non-encrypted movies. Otherwise there may be trouble without anything actually being wrong - if the copyrights holder does not want you to play the file, there's not much you can do.

There are a lot of things which you can do to play multimedia files nonstop. It would be useful to narrow this down to stuff you actually need. As it stands, the question is too general. What are you trying to do? What is going wrong? Be specific.

wb7sdxgary · 01-12-2009, 09:47 AM

What usually happens is that the video, Youtube or anything else I watch, stops in the middle or anywhere it wants. The colored bar that shows the video buffering gets caught by the video being played and then stops. It doesn't matter if I'm watching YouTube, Yahoo news clip, or another video stream. Thanks for any help. Gary

DragonSlayer48DX · 01-12-2009, 11:19 AM

Sounds like a bandwidth issue- the buffer progress bar should out-pace the playback at least 3 to 1. Do you have broadband internet? Are there any other apps running that use bandwidth, such as IM, P2P, etc? Are you sharing your internet connection with another PC?

wb7sdxgary · 01-12-2009, 11:11 PM

I'm using comcast but I have 2 other computers on a hard wired network. Maybe I should try using Youtube or another video without the router or other computers hooked up. The other machines are an old G4 Mac (400mhz) with a 16mb video card and another Ubuntu machine with a 1.3 ghz duron and 1gig of ram and a 256mb video card. The buffer progress bar barely stays ahead sometimes. Thanks for any suggestions. I don't have any other apps running that I know of. I do have a few other media players installed though. Gary