I am getting incredibly choppy video playback on my laptop. CPU registers 100% used when playing video files (totem, movie player, and vlc). I have 2gb physical ram and 1gb swap space, any ideas?

please post the output of the following commands.

lspci

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep -i driver

First off, sorry about the abrupt and non descriptive question, the space bar on my floppy keyboard is broken. The video lags when I resize above the native resolution of the video or when I full screen.

Here is the output you needed:

blacklotus@black-lotus:~$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep -i driver
Driver "kbd"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "synaptics"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "vesa"

bump

OK so you have the basic vesa driver no frills can just give you video.. but you didn't post the output of lspci so I can't tell you which driver you should be using...

please post the output of:

lspci

Alright, so I basically was searching for the wrong thing. I have the exact same problem that everyone else is having. the Intel 915GM is a pain in the ass.

I have installed the 915resolution hack, I don't really think that it did anything, but it's there. I also downloaded the Intel 915GM driver package from the Intel website. I installed the linux-kernel-devel package and tried to install the Intel drivers, but failed. My /etc/X11/xorg.conf file does show the VESA driver installed, but not the Intel accelerator.

Here's the output of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
06:05.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (rev 05)
06:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
06:09.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller (rev 01)


I'll just have to search for a while more before I can figure this out I guess.

aren't the intel drivers already in the ubuntu repository ?

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

then edit the xorg.conf and change the line from vesa to intel

The problem was that there are several threads dealing with this, none of which have any definitive answer. I did get everything working before your last post though. I kept checking my xorg.conf file to see if the Intel chipset appeared, but nothing changed, until I ran #apt-get upgrade.

This is how I got my Intel 915GM accelerator working:

#sudo apt-get install 915resolution
#sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
#sudo apt-get update
#sudo apt-get upgrade (this overwrote or changed the video driver entry in xorg.conf finally)

After all that it was still choppy video, but not as bad. I then found (after a few hours of searching) that WinXP automatically configures the shared video memory to optimal/max setting. Ubuntu doesn't. I had to go into the BIOS and change the shared video memory manually from 32mb to 128mb. I didn't think that this setting existed because of the minimal tweaking available in the Phoenix BIOS, but alas, it does.

This seems to be linux-wide issue that has existed in as far back as version 9 of adobe flash player. Symptoms are choppy video playback especially when viewing fullscreen videos from sites such as youtube, BBCiplayer, hulu.com etc.

It might help if everyone who is having this issue goes to adobe's support site and votes for the bug to be worked on: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1692

Has anyone found a workaround for this issue, if so you might want to let them know over at adobe :lol:

seems to be an issue with intel chipset and the way linux sets up the MTRR (see link)... not sure if this is just for ubuntu .... but have seen many people complaining about this on all sorts of linux distros..... This may be a fix .... Check out this link and scroll down to "To Fix Choppy Video Playback With Intel Video" section..... I havnt tried the fixMTRR script yet but I have tried it the manual way ... see this link. I made it as far as editing /proc/mtrr with the fallowing command using the info obtained from lspci -vvnn

echo "base=0xyouraddress size=0xyoursize type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr

but got the error "write error:device full"

So.. not sure if this really works or not but about to try again and see if it helps ... Allot of people that used this in the links provided say that it helps allot but I haven't seen it first hand yet...