Video is choppy on Mint 17
 

Hello,

I've been having a bit of a problem playing videos on my Linux Mint 17 laptop. The problem is that when I play a large video file, the playback will be normal for a few seconds, then it will freeze for a split second and continue for another few seconds before doing it all again. The problem seems to be independent of the player: vlc, mplayer, totem, etc...

I've managed to work around the problem with mplayer by increassing the cache via the comand line, e.g.

> mplayer -cache 10000 -cache-min 80 MyVideo.mp4

But this is a workaround and I have to keep rembering the options, which is hard for a person who drinks as heavily as I do :)

So here are my questions:

1 - Is there a more elegant solution to this problem? i.e. Are there software packages such as new codecs I should install or a config file I should try to alter?

2 - Is there a way I can save the command line arguments in some kind of alias so that when I call mplayer it is actually calling mplayer with these arguments?

thanks.

A page on how to set up aliases: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/aliases.html

Is there a lot of hard drive activity other than playing the video?

What video card, and which drivers are you using? Processor, chipset?

Thank you goumba,

I thought I had seen a linux command called "alias" before, but If I were a betting man, I would have never bet that I remembered that correctly. I will learn more about it in your link.

Regarding my hardware, here is the output of my lshw; another gold star for my memory:

If there is any other information that could be helpful let me know. Thanks again.

One thing I forgot to ask, what output driver is MPlayer using? Check in settings (right click the main window with all of the controls) under Video, and let us know.

I believe there's also somewhere in the settings dialog where you can set the video and audio cache without having to do it from the command line every time, but I don't have MPlayer handy ATM.

In my command line mplayer uses the xv output driver, I believe.

your setup looks normal enough.
media playback should work ootb.

try renaming mplayer directory, and try again.
try another media player. if you can get a recent version of mpv, i recommend that.

does this happen with ALL media files, regardless of type/location?

do other process take your resources?
what's the output of "top" during media playback (once for cpu, once for memory and once for i/o)?

How big is the file you are trying to play? What format is it and what is the resolution?

As far as I can see from your hardware, it would have issues playing 1080p

It could easily be the codec.

Alternatively check your cpu frequency settings. A bad setting could lead to bad movieplayback while everything else on computer works fine. I have had bugs with the "POWERSAVE" goovernor.

Check with "cpupower frequency-info" or cpufreq --help

Hello Zeebra, thanks as well for your help.

I get the following messages when I run mplayer with no commandline arguments. I believe it contains all of the resoultion/frequency information. The file is 313.9 Mb.

The output from "cpupower frequency-info" is as follows:

a single core cpu with 2.4GHz is good enough to play most non-HD video with mplayer.

the workaround you posted in post #1 is as good as it gets.

you can mark this [Solved] now.

ps:
to give you some rough estimation of what your computer is capable of:
a 45min TV episode should have less than 500MB, usually around 350.
a file can be smaller than that, but if it's only 5min long, then it's too hi-res for your machine.
you also have to watch your resources closely during video playback (e.g. close your browser completely).

Thanks everybody, although I feel there should be a more streamlined out-of-the-box solution for linux mint, the alias command is good enough for my purposes, so I'll mark my problem as solved. If anyone has further suggestions I'd be happy to try them out.

firstly, aliases can be made permanent by adding them to ~/.bash_profile (this file is sometimes named differently. search the web, or better mint forums, how bash works at login).

if you use a graphical environment, you can tell your file browser to open movie files with that same command (not the alias) via the "Open with..." menu.

you can tell mplayer to always use these settings via its own config.

It doesn hurt to try to set the frequency governor to "performance". Some video cards leave much work on the computer. This also depends on the video players "output mode", which you should try various options of.

1. Try, as root or with sudo
And then play the video.

2. Play the video with VLC && gstreamer based interface. (not sure what mint uses)

3. Download ALL the correct codecs, aac, ac3, ffmpeg, faad, faac, mpeg etc etc.


Anyways, I have tried Mint and I quite like it. The one thing I found, alike to Ubuntu and all its derivatives, is that it is a bit slugish and slow compared to for example Mageia or source based GNU/Linux like Slackware.

You can always install another test distribution to check if the problem is distribution specific, or you can change to a lighter distribution.

In the end, the picture depends on the computer overall resources, the available resources and the graphic card. If the pictures pixelrate is very high and there are many pictures per second, then choppy picture quality might occur on hardware that cannot handle it. Even lower pixelrate and many pictures per second or high pixelrate and medium picture per second can cause choppy pictures on many laptops or old desktop computers.

I have had several choppy picture issues with videos in the past, but I always solved them by installing the correct codecs, adjusting the cpu frequency, using the correct display settings and driver (preferably the free driver). Even then my hardware has had limitations. HD 720p on this computer works fine, while HD 1080p is slightly choppy. Connecting things to a HDMI to 1080p tv, it plays 1080p very choppy and 720p very well. This is due to the hardware limitations and the display card on my computer. So I simply play the videos at 720p.

Good luck solving it!

good advice, zeebra!
single core with 2.4GHz max.
that's why i said "it's as good as it gets".
ultimately, we would need to know more about the video(s) in question.
i had similar experiences on older devices - the usual 700mb compressed full-length movie plays just fine, put the 1080px dvd-rip (=HD) doesn't.