Playback problems in XBMC when compiz is running

[Gerhard Burger]

I installed XBMC from the wsnipex PPA (https://launchpad.net/~wsnipex/+archive/xbmc-xvba) because it has XVBA support, which I need for playing 1080p movies (my CPU is a AMD E-350 and can't handle much). Unfortunately, when compiz is running XVBA fails to set up a decoder session and I get a blank screen. The following message shows up in the xbmc log file:

    ERROR: XVBA::CreateSession - failed to create decoder session, line 633

When I start XBMC by first replacing compiz with metacity everything works fine.

Their are numerous reports on askubuntu, ubuntuforums and the xbmc forum which mention other playback problems related to XBMC (and other applications in full screen) having problems when compiz is running:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=116996&pid=1109069#pid1109069
http://askubuntu.com/questions/209460/xbmc-using-a-lot-of-cpu-when-fullscreen

On the XBMC wiki (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_for_Linux_specific_FAQ#Compiz_is_not_compatible_with_XBMC) they state that you should tick the 'Undirect fullscreen' option in the composite plugin, or disable composite altogether.

I believe the undirect fullscreen is enabled by default, so that didn't work, and disabling Composite will disable Opengl and parts of unity, and disabling opengl will in turn disable a lot of other plugins.

Is there nothing that can be done?