Linux choppy video playback

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Having problems with Video playback on my Fedora Build 38

Installed fedora work station on 2 machines both with VLC and all updates

intel i7 One plays videos smoothly around 5% CPU usage
This is a dell precision laptop using integrated graphics

Amd 7900x uses 50% CPU and has terrible choppy video
This is a tower with 32gb DDR 5 and a RTX4080

I have tried lots of different Nvidia drivers options and all the options inside VLC for encoding and buffering options.

Really trying to make the move full-time from Windows to Linux but something silly like this is not helping.

Thanks for any advice.

2

VLC on linux does not come with all the codecs like it does on windows. also, Fedora usually does not include a lot of ‘media stuff’ by default. you probably need to work through a guide like this one:

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What codec the video is matters, and whether Fedora 38 included the acceleration for an nvidia card (on the 7900) also matters.

In vlc check the codec:

  • Tools → Codec Information
    • Codec
    • Statistics (tells you dropped frames)

and an output of ‘vainfo’ might be informative.


For fedora exists rpmfusion for common media extras not in fedora’s out of box because drm police -

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

or, specifically:

Hardware codecs with NVIDIA

The Nvidia proprieatary driver doesn’t support VAAPI, but there is a wrapper that can bridge NVDEC/NVENC with VAAPI

sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver

I don’t daily drive Fedora but these are steps to look at.

This is some resource in general on this:

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

For record I don’t daily drive Arch either (would have to say if I did) but their docs are the best.

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Thank you Both for all your help, i have tried the recommendations and found that i still could not get it working the media is mostly H265 (hvec) and VLC will just not play smoothly but it is not telling me there are any lost frames.

As a last ditch attempt after trying the other Items on the lists i removed VLC via the GUI and then reinstalled it using the terminal

sudo dnf install vnc

this now works perfectly !!

not sure why, maybe it is because the software hub is pulling down a flathub version and the terminal is pulling from a different repo

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In general mpv is suggested over vlc for video playback

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