smplayer with vdpau has hiccups

[misterspider]

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and have it hooked up to my HDTV. My GPU is an 8600 GT and I am using the current nvidia driver. Mother board is GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H, CPU is AMD 4850e, using 2x1G ram 800MHz.

Everything I have installed on it comes straight through Synaptic. Smplayer seems to work fine with the VDPAU selected (cpu usage is nice and low during HD playback), but there is a slight problem that really annoys.

Every 2-3 seconds the picture seems to have the hiccups, its as though it gets stuck on one frame for a split second and then jumps to the next.

I'm looking for some suggestions to try and fix this.

[cchhrriiss121212]

Do you have any desktop effects enabled? Try turning them off if so.

[Linuxforall]

Did you install smplayer and mplayer from the ppa?

[misterspider]

Do you have any desktop effects enabled? Try turning them off if so.

I've tried to enable/disable vsync already through compiz. I need vsync enabled, otherwise there is tearing.

[misterspider]

Did you install smplayer and mplayer from the ppa?

No, both of these through Synaptic.

[SeijiSensei]

Do you have the same problems viewing the videos with mplayer alone?

If you have experience compiling software from source, I'd recommend building an mplayer binary from one of the daily source code releases at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/. In Ubuntu, you'll need to run "sudo apt-get install build-essential" and "sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer" to get the necessary tools and libraries.

Another option is to add rvm's repositories and use his versions of mplayer and smplayer. (rvm is the author of SMPlayer.)

[cchhrriiss121212]

I've tried to enable/disable vsync already through compiz. I need vsync enabled, otherwise there is tearing.

Try to actually turn them off, switch to metacity using CSM or go to preferences>appereance and select "none" in the effects tab.

[misterspider]

Thanks, I will try these options and report back.

[andrew.46]

There is another option:

Howto: Build the svn MPlayer under the latest release version of Ubuntu
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1542240

The writer of that guide is usually fairly approachable too .

Andrew

[misterspider]

I'll give that a try too.
Turning off desktop effects didn't solve it.