Hi all,

On both my hp dv9500 laptop display and an external display the video I'm playing gets jumpier as I increase the size or quality of video. When I full screen youtube videos or dvd movies the video jumps and flickers a lot. It seems to drop frames even more on the external display than the notebook's display.

I'd rather not replace the nvidia video card or increase it's memory.

I have quite a bit of system memory sitting around doing nothing while I watch a video, can I some how enlist it to help out the video card memory?

If so, is this already automatically being handled by Linux, I use debian, or is there a way I can configure my system to do this?

Thanks, Jim

It depends.. does your Laptops video chip use part of the system memory insterad of having it's own memory ?
if so you can usually portion out a bit more system memory to dedicate to the Video chip.. Just remember when you do that that you are giving up that RAM and the system will not be able to access it.

Sometimes this will be done in the BIOS. some chips you can also specify this in teh xorg.conf file.

so what video chip is in your laptop ?

lspci

lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M GS (rev a1)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01)
07:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
07:09.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
07:09.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
07:09.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
07:09.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff)

You have a good video card in that laptop.. do you have the proprietary nvidia Drivers installed ? they do NOT get installed by default because they are not free drivers..

http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

You must have non-free repositories enabled in your sources list for the following to work.

CTRL + AL + F2 - to get to a command prompt
Log in as root


/etc/init.d/gdm stop
aptitude update
aptitude install module-assistant build-essential
m-a update
m-a prepare
m-a a-i nvidia-kernel
aptitude install nvidia-glx
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

When the reconfiguartion script with that last command,
Select nvidia as the driver
unselect dri
select glx

then restart the X server

/etc/init.d/gdm start

That should fix your video playback issues.


If an update breaks your graphics in the future, just repeat the procedure starting with m-a update, and skipping the dpkg-reconfigure steps because the configuration is already done.