Poor video quality
 

Hello,

I'm new here and I'm hoping someone can help.

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 as a dual boot with Vista. Most things work fine except when I play videos. They play and the sound is fine and the video quality is fine but the screen keeps flickering. Actually, the window that the video is playing in flickers not the entire desktop. Sometimes I can see the window underneath as it flickers.

Someone suggested to install the VLC media player and to set the video output to X11 and that worked. So now VLC is the only media player that works but any other application still has the same problem and I haven't been able to find similar settings to change. I would especially like to get Totem to work since that's the one that came with the distribution.

Is there a configuration file or something where I can adjust the settings for other applications?

Thanks
Chris Hansen

Have you installed the driver for your video card? The default driver in Ubuntu tends to be a little bit choppy if I recall.

I did install a "proprietary" driver. Videos played with VLC work fine since I changed the video output to X11 and I can watch youtube videos and they work fine so I don't think it's a problem with the driver.

That X11 setting seemed to do the trick in VLC which makes me think that other applications might benefit from some adjusting but I don't know how to do that.

I got it!!

I found an old post with the answer:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=535920

For convenience I'll copy and paste the winning info here:

"If you are using the gstreamer backend then press alt+F2 and type

Code:

gstreamer-properties

Go to the video tab and change it to X Window System (No Xv)"

Awesome!

Thanks for posting the solution here.