Playing YouTube (and other) web videos full-screen is choppy and freezes display

[Brett Hennock]

Mint 11 (Katya) Gnome 32-bit

When running YouTube video (and other web streamed videos), either in Chrome or Firefox, results in the display in full screen immediately becoming heavily choppy and within a second is frozen (audio continues unhindered), and it takes repeated efforts to escape by way of escape key, full screen toggle button, or trying to activate expo mode in Compiz, to get out. Can be very difficult to exit full screen.

I have recently noticed that re-installing the video drivers, or rebooting the machine fixes this, but not for long. Soon the behaviour begins again, but I can't pinpoint it to any one application.

A list of applications I always have running that may have an effect:
Compiz
Cairo Dock 2.3.0~1 (without OpenGL)
Screenlets 0.1.3
Desktop Drapes 0.5.2
Thunderbird 3.1.15
Chrome 15.0.874.106
Firefox 7.0.1

GPU is nVidia GeForce 8500GT

I rarely reboot my machine, always opting to let it fall into suspend and wake it up when required. I have done this for years under Ubuntu, recently made the switch to Mint. I definitely remember this happening with Ubuntu 11.04 before I switched to Mint. (but never happened with Ubuntu 10.10 or previous versions)

Happy to provide more information, just point me there.

[Paul Weiss (interweiss)]

I would blame the poor performance on Adobe's Flash rather than on Mint. Flash just gets worse with every version. To put things into perspective, I just purchased a new notebook and Flash video at 720p and higher is choppy.

  I am eagerly waiting for html5 to take over, but the transition is taking much longer than expected.

[Brett Hennock (bhennock)]

Thanks. I suppose that is a possibility, but it's not just choppy, it's unplayable at full screen.

Further to this, I've been running full screen Flash videos for years (in Ubuntu - but Ubuntu 11.04 had the same issue), so if it is Flash, could there be a recent implementation that has caused this problem?