Correct, i'll just give you a widget to watch your cpu and other resources.  Never leave home without it imho, about the second thing I install usually on a desktop.

Htop works at the cli as well, apt-get install htop, first thing I usually install with vim. 

Idea is to watch your cpu constraints.  Video decoding is usually a cpu function if not tending to a gpu, so it sounds like something is constrained.  I haven't seen this in a long time (thinking h.264@1080p on a p4 with no vdpau), and have been pirating ripping movies since the 90's, playing them under linux since mid 2000's.  Any modern cpu should handle this pretty ok.

If you have nvidia 9xxx+, install vdpau libs for hw decode, ati 4000+ use xvba libs.  Could be a weird interrupt/scheduler issue, but doubt it unless hardware is ancient.

-mb



On 12/24/2013 10:40 PM, Michael Havens wrote: