My laptop can't play HD movies without stutter, via stream or VLC. Graphic Card problem?

Question

I am on a Dell Latitude D430, Intel® Core™2 CPU U7600 @ 1.20GHz × 2, 2GB Ram, Graphics Intel® 945GM x86/MMX/SSE2 and running Ubuntu 14.02 32bit.

Whenever I play movies that are 1080p, VLC starts stuttering like crazy, the whole system basically jams, CPU consumption goes through the roof and even firefox is so slow. I stopped getting 1080p movies altogether to avoid these frozen states. With 720p movies the situation is a bit better. Mostly they work fine, but every once a while VLC starts stuttering and pixelating. If I press pause and wait for a minute, the CPU seems to "cool down" and I can resume playing without problems. Sometimes even on youtube, which is automatically set at low res, 360p, the play stutters and this is certainly not the internet which is 500mbps and also streaming is fully pre-loaded.

I at first thought that this could depend on the slow CPU. I have run terminal -top to check CPU consumption and it looks high, when I play movies it goes up to 120 or 130% consumption, but I think this is still ok, since it's a dual core, so maximum should be 200%, right? I worry the problem is maybe with the integrated intel graphic card. I have found many users complaining about this running ubuntu, with my same exact model. The drivers are correctly installed and everything seems kosher, if it wasn't that performance is very bad.

So my question is: is this problem with Ubuntu? if I install iOS Luna or another distro or even (yuck) putting on a Win7 would I be able to play movies normally? I think the laptop specs should be enough for at least a 720p movie and I use mainly my laptop for movies as it is connected to my tv.

if the problem lies with the specs insufficient to play HD movies, should I buy a graphic card or is it the CPU that it is too slow and I need to just resign myself to get a new laptop?

thank you

Solution 1

[...] the chip is able to accelerate the decoding of MPEG2 videos and supports Motion Compensation (2 HD Streams simultaneously). Modern HD videos in MPEG 4 or VC-1 can not be decoded with the graphics card.

Source: Notebookcheck

Now, speaking from experience with a similar GPU (GMA 3150, which is supposed to be a little faster), you can play 720p HD video with VLC, but no 1080p and flash-html5 video decoding is awful (youtube, for example).

This occurs both on Windows 7, 8.1 and Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04.

Sorry for that, the 945GM really isn't made for 2014. But 720p videos, without streaming, using VLC, that should work.

I personnaly noticed some small improvements using Windows over Ubuntu, regarding Video Decoding.

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You won't be able to change an integrated chipset on a laptop, or if you're lucky enough to find a video-card that could fit somewhere in there, nothing tells you that the laptop will accept it, as the mainboard are usually pretty closed on additional stuffs.

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Finally, the issue here is the GPU chipset, not the CPU, which is good enough for most things.

Solution 2

sudo apt-get install x264 i965-va-driver libva-intel-vaapi-driver vainfo

then activate GPU hardware acceleration in VLC Tools -> Preferences -> Input&Codecs -> Hardware-accelerated decoding = VAAPI

https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding/

How do I enable hardware accelerated video in VLC with Intel HD 4000 GPU?

Also, I've found this link helpfull with sandybridge but not so much on pentium-4 but it won't hurt to at least give it a shot http://www.webupd8.org/2013/09/adobe-flash-player-hardware.html

Finally, there are all sorts of openGL packages available that are not installed by default, just dont install the ones for nvidia and or ati etc.

Comments

[Admin]

I have an IBM X40, it's older and slower than your laptop, with a pentium-M 1400 cpu and GM-855 chipset/graphics. I use LXDE desktop on a minimal install install to keep things quick. Maxed out memory of 1.5GB. It plays most 720p films just fine. The odd film will pixelate a bit. It usually doesn't play 1080 properly, but would do some parts of some films before I gave up on 1080p. It also doesn't like h.265, but seems fine on everything else. Your newer, faster laptop should be fine on almost all 720p films, so keep trying. You do close your browser when trying to watch films?

[kongcla]

I have followed instructions and activated VA API in VLC. I first played a 720p movie and it seemed ok, so I started opening other windows, downloading a movie, etc. and it quickly started pixelating and stuttering. I closed all windows and restarted VLC and played only the 720p movie without doing anything else and now this played fine. I am not sure if this is an improvement, though: in the past I think I was also able to play 720p movies if I did not do anything else. Maybe slightly better now... 1080p movies are still not playable even using hardware acceleration.. still havent tried flash

[kongcla]

thanks for this, albeit bad news! isn't there the possibility of buying a new graphic card connected via USB? I am not even sure they exist... just trying to be creative!!

[kongcla]

I have now also tried the flash acceleration technique, but it does not help at all on my case

[amanthethy]

You could try updating the drivers for the chip. I wouldn't expect much aof a difference though. :p 01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/2014/…