Arch Linux

lostcause

Member

Registered: 2016-05-25

Posts: 7

Choppy VIdeo VLC & YouTube, Using GDM

Hi,
I have installed Arch Linux on VirtualBox. Have got Hardware Acceleration enabled in Settings. Whenever I am playing videos on YouTube or VLC / MPlayer, they are quite choppy.
It says in here (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vi … celeration) that GDM is known to break hardware acceleration

Hardware acceleration
Hardware acceleration can be activated from the VirtualBox options on the host computer. Note the GDM display manager 3.16+ is known to break hardware acceleration support. So if you get issues with hardware acceleration, try out another display manager (lightdm seems to work fine).

Am not sure if this is the real issue.
I tried installing lightdm, but it was not starting properly and so I reverted to GDM.

I was using Slim earlier, but that was giving me some problems in terms of getting full screen view. Also, it seems like work has stalled on Slim. So, I chose to go with GDM.

I also increased the Video Memory to 128 MB, which is the maximum permissible limit for my VIrtualBox.
When I installed MPlayer, the choppiness looked to be a little bit less. Or maybe it's just my eyes playing with my brain.

Is anyone else facing the same issue? Is it at all a Hardware Acceleration issue? Or is it something else?

Please let me know if I need to post any confuguration details of my setup. Am almost at the end of my quest for a lightweight Arch installation before making a full time switch to Arch as my physical OS, except for this and a couple of other minor things.

lostcause

Member

Registered: 2016-05-25

Posts: 7

Re: Choppy VIdeo VLC & YouTube, Using GDM

Alright a little bit of an update on this. I tried playing videos after disabling GDM. I tried with Slim and LXDM. The performance with Slim, especially when using YouTube was OK-ish. LXDM did not improve the situation at all.

Any idea folks?
Has anyone else faced this issue?

Last edited by lostcause (2016-05-31 19:21:05)

dockland

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2015-06-06

Posts: 861

Re: Choppy VIdeo VLC & YouTube, Using GDM

Alright a little bit of an update on this. I tried playing videos after disabling GDM. I tried with Slim and LXDM. The performance with Slim, especially when using YouTube was OK-ish. LXDM did not improve the situation at all.

Any idea folks?
Has anyone else faced this issue?

I'm on bare metal with my Arch Xfce DE, but am running and testing some other distros (in VirtualBox) with no issues whatsoever with VLC, youtube or anything like that. It gets a bit laggy over all when i use 4K resolution though. I run Arch on kinda old hardware using a Intel 4790K and GTX 960. What hardware do you use on your host?

Have you enabled  PAE/NX?

Last edited by dockland (2016-06-02 19:35:03)

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lostcause

Member

Registered: 2016-05-25

Posts: 7

Re: Choppy VIdeo VLC & YouTube, Using GDM

Hello,
If you call your hardware kind of old, then mine should be called primitive.
I am using an i5 processor with no dedicated graphics card. Do you think that this is the reason? My RAM is a decent 4 GB, although I intend to increase it by next week.
I checked on Ubuntu as well and after enabling 3D acceleration and maximising the video memory from VirtualBox's settings, I was able to play my videos using Ubuntu's default media player without any lag.

Oh and I did enable PAE / NX on my Arch installation, but there was no noticeable difference.

I am running Compton for compositing. Could that be an issue? I killed Compton and tried to play videos, but it did not have any noticeable impact.

I am guessing then that this is something specific with Arch and / or my installation.

Last edited by lostcause (2016-06-04 16:35:12)

lostcause

Member

Registered: 2016-05-25

Posts: 7

Re: Choppy VIdeo VLC & YouTube, Using GDM

I finally made some progress! I uninstalled all media players and then installed mpv. And guess what?! the videos aren't choppy anymore. The only thing is that I have to kill Compton to make the videos play smoothly.

Need to explore this option now then. Let me know if there are any known solutions already. Lifts a bit of a load off my chest this discovery.