Linux Ubuntu stream and video performance bad?

I was recently forced to rebuild my HTPC with a recent version of Ubuntu (18.04.3 LTS). After I changed the GPU driver, the performance has improved, but it is anything but reasonable. I'm talking about stuttering playback, and asynchronous image halves. This is of course not useful with a HTPC. Also, the image quality of Netflix does not go beyond 480 or 720p (in about), with a connected 1080p television.

The hardware I can rule out as a problem, the play has worked perfectly before reinstalling, also should a GTX650 2GB and a G1610 Celeron normally sufficient. To the drivers I find at this point hardly something and find myself in the slightly modified UI of the new version only badly cope.

What kind of causes can the poor performance still have? What did I possibly miss?

You may need to install the Nvidia driver. Not the source open "nouveau" driver (does not support video acceleration) but that of nvidia.de

drivers download

https://www.nvidia.de/.../153431/de

Help page for driver installation →

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Grafikkarten/Nvidia/Manuelle_Treiberinstallation/

Are you using Nvidia's proprietary video driver and have you also installed the Hardware Video Decoding API (VDPAU, VA API)?

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Video-Dekodierung_beschleunigen/

So the decoding is not yet. If this is not among the automatic third-party packages that can be chosen during the installation, I have not reinstalled.

I use a Nividia metapackage, version 450 I think. The X. Org driver I voted off. However, there are also binary drivers that I honestly never heard of.

With

lspci -nnk | grep vga -iA5

can you show you the driver used

…
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
…

Whether or not vdpau is installed on your system is shown to you by your package manager or

vdpauinfo

(if vdpauinfo is installed).

You can test the GPU video acceleration by playing a video while watching the CPU usage (top, ps, etc.).

Ex.:

mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau VIDEO_H264.mkv

In contrast to "non-GPU accelerated video streams", the CPU output of mplayer in top remains relatively low,> 10%.

The driver has already been changed to the Nvidia Metapackage, version 450 or 430. However, it does cause some problems. Previously, he discarded the setting and powered up the system with the Noveau driver in an incredible 800x600 resolution. So I'm not sure if this is correct.

Grep does not work. Can enter it, but nothing comes back.

vdpauinfo is not installed. It can't be installed either. According to the terminal, independence is not fulfilled. In the terminal it means that the GPU driver does not allow it. The same thing applies to all commands that have to do with the GPU and its drivers.

Try sudo

sudo lspci -nnk | grep -iA5 vga

or without grep and search for "VGA compatible controller", a few lines below it should be "Kernel driver in use: nvidia":

lspci -nnk

According to the terminal, independence is not fulfilled. In the terminal it means that the GPU driver does not allow it.

Can you copy the exact error message here in?

Did you try to install vdpau:

sudo apt-get install libvdpau1 vdpauinfo

Vdpau is installed, vdpauinfo now returns something. The driver used in the window for additional drivers is the following:

NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-435 are used (proprietary)

This is, as far as I can see, the latest driver of my choice. Still, the performance is a disaster, the whole UI seems completely lethargic to me, as if it were running on the available hardware, similar to the Unity environment from the previous versions, which I have therefore replaced by GNOME.

The problems occur especially in videos, which I play via the web browser. Say firefox and Chrome. YouTube is relatively fluid, but a lot of micro-stuttering, Netflix, however, begins to stutter as soon as you move only the cursor. Anything but what you know about the hardware.

What is the CPU and memory load (can you indicate with top) when the problems occur?

I did a test, playing a video in 1080p resolution at 60 FPS via YouTube under Firefox. When playing the CPU utilization is directly high to about 80%, very unstable, the memory usage remained unchanged at about 1/3 of the available memory of 2x2GB DDR3.

Whether the nvidia driver has been installed correctly on your system, you can easily find out with the tool nivida-settings. That should have been installed with the driver together. If the driver version (eg 4.30) is displayed here after starting the program, the driver is installed.

I could imagine, however, that you may not be of much use. Because if you use Netflix you will certainly do that under Linux via a browser. Under Linux, browsers currently do not support accelerated video decoding (eg VDPAU) by the GPU. It does not matter which GPU or which driver you use. There are probably experimental features in Firefox and Chrome but these are disabled by default. The video decoding runs so completely on your CPU and it could just as problem with such a low-performance CPU, especially if there may still be an unstable network and / or Internet connection.

Unfortunately, the limited video quality on Netflix is also normal. Netflix supports 1080p as the maximum resolution when using a browser. However, this is only possible with Microsoft Edge and Safari (OSX) and with Google Chrome under ChromeOs. For all other browser / operating system combinations 720p is the current maximum also for Chrome and Firefox under Windows, OSX or Linux.

You could also try to use KODI for media playback. Just install the YouTube addon and see how the performance is. At least for local video files, KODI supports VDPAU.

What does the CPU load look like if you watch a Youtube video without a web browser directly in the video player?

e.g. With mplayer (+ youtube-dl):

youtube-dl -f 137 -q -o- "

| mplayer -cache 8192 -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -

Second terminal:

top 'pidof -f' -p% d 'mplayer'

What does Firefox show you on about: support under HW_Compositing, OpenGL_Compositing, OMTP, Webrender?