So I recently made a discovery that I honesty feel daft for not realizing before.

For anyone who recently moved to Linux or like me didn’t think about it there are separate video acceleration libraries for your GPU! Now most of you were probably completely aware of that. But I wasn’t so I’ve been mainly watching TV on my ThinkPad X230 for a couple of years at this point, and I always found video playback kinda lacking sometimes(stuttering, screen tearing, etc), but I always though that was due to the generally bad intel GPU drivers on Linux( there are libraries for AMD and Nvidia too). Until I came across this page on the Arch wiki( which except package names should apply to any other distro).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration

And I’ve since had much better video playback performance that no longer has stuttering and screen tearing!

So I hope this helps someone else at some point in time have a better experience on their Linux distro watching some TV or YouTube.

  • CaptDust
    3·
    1 year ago

    Noting, this PSA is absolutely useful for older components - especially Intel, but anyone using something newer than Skylake (circa 2015) is probably already set up with intel-media-driver or the nv/amd video driver.

    nvtop is a useful tool to monitor GPU activity and the decoder in use when a video plays, if you’re unsure