How to reduce the tearing while watching videos?

I'm using the Ubuntu 10.10 with both VLC player and MPlayer and already installed the ATI drivers. I watched the same videos on Windows 7 and Ubuntu. But on Ubuntu the images have a lot of tearing. I tried some newbish-configs on my ATI config tool, but nothing changed.

I tried videos in mkv, avi, rmvb... and in all kinds of resolutions. I would love to see some tips or maybe a solution to this problem.

(I have searched for similar questions but I didn't find any :/ )

The english is not my primary lang so sorry for my mistakes.

Thanks in advance!

[]'s Leonardo

My HW Config (Acer Aspire 5740G-6979) -ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 -Intel Core i5-430M -4GB Ram

Solution 1:

Tearing in videos is caused by the video drawing not being synchronised with the refresh-rate of the display. This results in displaying the top part of one frame and the bottom half on the previous frame at the same time, which is particularly noticeable on sections of video with horizontal panning.

The open-source drivers, with DRI2, should be able to synchronise their drawing with the screen refresh properly, even when running with desktop effects enabled¹. The proprietary nVidia and ATi drivers may not do this properly.

Finally, disabling desktop effects should eliminate the tearing regardless of what driver you're using - all (sensible) drivers can sync-to-vblank for video in this case.

¹: Technically, the problem is having a compositing manager running, because that means that all windows are first drawn off-screen and then composited to the display by the compositing manager. Since the video is first “drawn” offscreen, it's not possible to synchronise this to the screen refresh.

Solution 2:

The easiest way to get rid of the tearing is to use the open source drivers (so, remove the closed source driver). Provided that your card works with them of course, but most cards do work (including 3D) with the open source drivers nowadays...