Choppy video playback [closed]

Solution 1:

You can boost your preformance on the machine with the Nvidia chip by enabling VDPAU, which offloads some of the video rendering to your GPU instead of the CPU.

Install the package libvdpau1 and try using Mplayer to play your video. You'll need to have recent proprietary Nvidia drivers too.

Solution 2:

Newer X drivers are often available from the xorg-edgers repository:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers

However, be aware those are just snapshots of upstream code, and not supported by Ubuntu. They can sometimes have bugs and you might find it challenging to revert back to stock Ubuntu stuff, so only install them if you either feel very lucky, or you are skillful enough you can undo any damage they might cause.

Solution 3:

When I play high-definition content (720p to 1080p) on my computer which I bought in 2006, it struggles sometimes. I use mplayer for this, and when it detects a slow rendering of the video, it hints me to use the following command to play the video:

mplayer -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all video-1080p.mkv

This is just enough for me, in the case of my desktop computer, to watch 1080p videos. I hope this might be helpful to you.

I'm not sure what all the options mean (haven't bothered to read the man page), but it seems like it's doing something right. :)