sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Lyle Gordon <lgordon@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Listers,

I just wanted to say thanks for the great support setting up my vaio
VGN-Z590 with ubuntu - its running really well.

The only problem I have is when I'm playing video with the nvidia (speed)
graphics card I get tearing of the video - horizontal lines due to some of
the previous frame overlapping with the current one.

see:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/01/how-to-fix-video-tearing-in-videos-nvidia-ubuntu/for
an example.

I've tried a number of solutions found online including disabling compiz
effects (set to none in the preferences), enabling sync to vblank, manually
setting the refresh rate in compiz, but I can't seem to get rid of the
problem. I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 amd64. The problem seems to be worse when
I'm using 2 monitors withtwinview (the external over HDMI). However, I get
no tearing in full screen openGL games (ie. quake3). None of the solutions
I've tried seem to work and I was hoping someone on this listserv with the
same hardware might have found a workable solution.

Once, I thought the newest drivers might solve the problem so I tried using
the janitor script to update the nvidia drivers directly from the ftp (newer
than the distro drivers), however, this completely broke my install so I
reinstalled ubuntu and then added the x-updates ppa:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu maverick main

Then I ran the janitor script and it was able to pull the latest drivers
(270.18 as of today) from this ppa but this didn't solve the tearing problem
either. I see it both with mplayer and VLC 1.1.7 (latest version as of
today).

Thanks very much, I'm really looking forward to solving this as I like to
hook my computer up to my TV via HDMI to watch movies.

-Lyle

--
Lyle Gordon
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Northwestern University

2220 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Tel: (847) 491-3584
Mobile: (847) 400-4071
lgordon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx