Friendly Tech Ninja Linux how-to's for beginners

Howto: Fix ATI Video Playback

If you've come from my post on Howto: Fix Ubuntu 9.04 ATI Driver Issues and the drivers installed successfully congratulations. Although now you've found in Movie Player (Totem) when playing video and moving the window the video starts to tear or when you click on a window that covers up Totem the video plays on top of every other window. The reason this occurs is simply because the ATI drivers suck! (I'm using the driver that are accessed through "System" -> "Administration" -> "Hardware Drivers")...however there is a way to fix this!

Update: I've written an update to this fix here.

Step 1
Firstly we need to install VLC media player, I personally think this is the best video player out there on any platform seeing as it will play just about anything under the sun. In your terminal run:
sudo apt-get install vlc

It shouldn't take too long to download and install.

Step 2
Once it's installed open up "VLC media player" from your "Applications" -> "Sound & Video" menu.
Click on "Tools" -> "Preferences" -> "Video". Where is says "Output" the current value is "Default", change this using the drop down menu to "X11 vidoe output". Click "Save" and exit the window.

Step 3
You're going to want to make VLC your default video player, this can be done by right clicking a video and going to "Properties" -> "Open With" and select VLC, if VLC is not there go to "Add" and select it from the list of applications, click "Add" again and set it as the default video player.

Note: You might have to repeat this step for different video formats eg. avi, xvid, mp4. You only have to set VLC as default to that video format once on any file of that format, after that it'll know to open up those formats in VLC. Although if you do run into a video that opens in Totem, you know what to do.

If you have any problems, questions, suggestions please leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Howto: Fix Ubuntu 9.04 ATI Driver Issues
2. Howto: Fix AVG + iTunes Update = Small.BOG Trojan Horse