Have you tried another linux distro e.g (k)ubuntu as part of troubleshooting? This is a serious suggestion.
My video H/W (VIA Unichrome Pro) is different to what’s been posted here. I had perfect internet video including BBC iplayer on 10.3 with 60% cpu utilization. On early 11.1 and kde 3.5 (missed out 11.0) it’s choppy/jerky with 90-96% cpu utilization. With speech, the video lags slightly behind the sound (perfect). This is at 16bit colour depth, as 24bit is worse. BTW, local video is fine. There have been slight improvements over 8 months with performance update to Xorg, xorg-server is at 1.5.2, but it’s still jerky at around 88-93% cpu. Over the 8 months, especially recently, I have spent more time researching and troubleshooting than I care to recall, with little progress except to isolate components. It’s also as bad using two different drivers: openchrome, and chrome9 (VIA’s attempt at open source) . On 11.2 M1 it was almost perfect, but on M2/3/4 it became jerky again (xorg-xserver at 1.6.2).
I multiboot with* kubuntu 9.04* (upgraded from 8.04) and kde 4.2. Its internet video using BBC iPlayer is perfect at 24bit depth, CPU utilization similar to opensuse 10.3, on the same H/W same video driver version (openchrome driver). xorg-server is different at 1.6.0, but I am not yet convinced this is the (only) problem.
There are several other S/W components involved, and there could be in the case of your H/W. In my case this is what I found.
Although internet video (BBC iplayer) is I assume 2D only, there may be more S/W components involved than just xorg and the video driver. In my case, the driver takes care of 2D acceleration, but AGP DMA can be used for 2D (and 3D). Driver options involving DMA require that DRI is enabled. This brings in other components such as libdrm and two cooperating kernel driver modules, drm.ko and a H/W specific* via.ko*.
On 11.1 and 11.2, although DRI installation completes according to Xorg.0.log,
(II) CHROME(0): [DRI] installation complete
However this only holds for a few more messages, but then, checking if direct rendering is working (even in theory), “grep rendering /var/log/Xorg.0.log” shows:
(II) CHROME(0): direct rendering disabled
Enabled by default, driver option “EnableAGPDMA” enables the AGP DMA functionality in DRM, forcing 2D and 3D acceleration to use AGP DMA. However, on 11.1/11.2, when checking if the kernel DRM modules are loaded and functional, “dmesg | grep -e agp -e drm” shows the following error (see last line):
Linux agpgart interface v0.103
agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: AGP bridge [1106/0204]
agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xf0000000
[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[drm] Initialized via 2.11.1 20070202 on minor 0
agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge
agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V3 device into 8x mode
[drm:via_do_init_map] *ERROR* failed to find dma buffer region!
Having got this far in august, I searched for openSUSE 11.1 bugs and found bug #521382. Ignoring the rant there about drm etc., it’s clear that very early 11.1 release drm kernel module(s) were patched, but libdrm wasn’t, and that appears to be problematic. I haven’t found any mailing list conversations to explain why this was done, who requested it, or how (if ever) it was tested and by whom. Also, there is no explanation as to why the unichrome driver (inferior support and useless) was included in openSUSE distro (11.1), and openchrome (superior feature support) wasn’t. Eight months of total bloody secrecy >:(.
I included my specific details above in case it gives you any clues as to where to look, or may help you to diagnose the cause of your jerky internet video. I could be on the wrong track, so if anyone wants to disagree or confirm, feel free. 