Poor Video playback performance

[xendistar]

I am running Debian Testing on a Lenovo T530 Laptop and if I play any video the playback is poor, for instance if I watch a Youtube Video @720p it play couple seconds of video, then pause for a split second then play, then pause again and that continues through out the video. I have tired lowering the video quality down to 360p but the play back was the same. I have tried playing a video (mp4) stored in /Home/Me/Video using Mplayer and VLC, the video plays but after a second of playback there is a noticeable sutter which then continues all the way through the video, both video players are as bad as each other, both players are using out the box settings I have not tried to adjust anything.

Laptop spec is as follows:

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 mit@NX1:~$ inxi -G
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GF108M [NVS 5400M] driver: nouveau v: kernel 
           Device-3: Acer ThinkPad Integrated Camera type: USB driver: uvcvideo 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa 
           resolution: 1: 1600x900~60Hz 2: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel HD Graphics 4000 (IVB GT2) v: 4.2 Mesa 20.3.4
CPU:       Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i7-3630QM bits: 64 type: MT MCP L2 cache: 6 MiB 
           Speed: 2840 MHz min/max: 1200/3400 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 2840 2: 2914 3: 3009 
           4: 2972 5: 2803 6: 2899 7: 2735 8: 2767 

The laptop also has 16mb ram and Sata SSD hard disk and the Desktop is XFCE
Laptop outputs to its own screen (1600 x 900) and a 23" ext. monitor on a VGA connection at 1920 x 1080
Laptop runs entirely on ethernet, @200Mbps to the outside world

I have run this laptop with a couple other distro,s in the past, Xunbuntu and another Debian based Distro and they have not had video playback issue I am having now.

Can anybody please advise on how I should improve my video playback

Can anybody point me in the right direction to resolve this issue

Tim

[mm3100]

It is possible you don't have hardware accelerated decoding. Or it isn't working well,

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Device-2: NVIDIA GF108M [NVS 5400M] driver: nouveau v: kernel 

I don't know how is h-a decoding on nouveau, but that could be one part of your problem. For me vlc has h-a decoding set for auto and defaults to using dedicated GPU, for you would be nvidia. You could try to use Nvidia drivers instead.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

Just to see if you have it in VLC, go to Tools, Preferences (or just press ctrl+p). And look under input/codecs what you have available under hardware-accelerated decoding?

Try to change codec in use for VLC, so that it runs on intel graphics instead of nvidia. But since you said you have same issue on youtube I think it is something else. Youtube shouldn't use dGPU by default, so it should run on your intel graphics. Did you install intel microcode?

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apt install intel-microcode

[xendistar]

I will investigate the Nvidia page but I seem to remember there was only the old 396 version Nvidia driver of the nouveau driver due to its age.

Yes the Intel Microocde is installed

Vlc harware-accelerated decoding is currently set to automatic, I will have a play with these options

Are there any codecs that I should download?

[mm3100]

Check wiki page for h-a. You will find more information there.
https://wiki.debian.org/HardwareVideoAcceleration

[stevepusser]

As far as I can see, your system is using the kernel's modesetting driver for Intel at the moment--nouveau is not in the picture.

Firefox doesn't support hardware-accelerated video as far as I know. For Intel, you need to add some va-api related packages, and your chip may not support many modern codecs--maybe just h.264 and MPEG2. The newer Chromium browsers in Debian support vaapi with some extra setup, but AFAIK, streaming video always has some extra overhead.

I'd say install vainfo and i965-va-driver-shaders, then run vainfo to see if vaapi is working and what codecs are supported. If that gets working, then VLC tries to use vaapi by default, so you could try playing a local video with vlc from the terminal to see if that's working.

I'm pretty sure we have vaapi working for Intel chipsets out of the box for MX Linux 19.4, if you'd like to try a LiveUSB of that to see if there's any difference with VLC. If it's better, it is possible to stream YT video through VLC or several other apps to get rid of the overhead, and even apply that to pure Debian.