Saturday, May 07, 2011

HOWTO : HD video playback on Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop

Step 1 - Install the official driver and SMPlayer from Ubuntu :

Install the official nVidia or ATi display card driver from the "Hardware drivers" from your Ubuntu 11.04 system. Then, install SMPlayer for the video player.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install smplayer


Step 2 - SMPlayer configuration :

(A) Open the SMplayer. Select "Option" -- "Preference".

Go to "General" on the left hand side :

(1) If you have an nVidia display card :
"General" -- "Video" -- "Output driver" : vdpau

(2) If you have an ATi/AMD Radeon display card :
"General" -- "Video" -- "Output driver" : xv (0 - ATI Radeon AVIVO video)

(B) Go to "Performance" on the left hand side :
"Performance" -- "Cache" -- "Local" : 99999 kb
"Performance" -- "Cache" -- "Streaming" : 99999 kb

"Performance" -- "Performance" -- "Allow hard frame drop (can lead to image distortion)" : Enable
"Performance" -- "Performance" -- "H.264" -- select "loop filter (only skip on HD moive)"

If you have dual core CPU -
"Performance" -- "Performance" -- "Decoding thread (only MEG-1/2 and H.264)" : 2

Remarks :

Lenovo ThinkPad X100e, which is equipped with ATi Radeon HD3200 and AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 single processor, can playback HD movies (such as MKV) smoothly.

That's all! See you.