Hi, I use VLC (other players are not an option) and was suffering pretty bad screen tearing. A quick Google search turned up the following fix.
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
# Enable SNA and TearFree on the intel graphics card
Section "Device"
Identifier "intel"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection
This fixed the screen tearing but now my video playback appears to be slightly to slow, It’s not jerky but seems to be playing back at a reduced fps.
It may (or may not) be worth noting that I never had any tearing issue with Ubuntu but did have equally bad tearing with Windows 7 (although with windows I could fix it by closing my laptop lid just far enough to disable the internal screen. (I have it connected to a TV via HDMI).
Perhaps you should try another player in any case, just to have for a test/comparison purpose (MPlayer from cli perhaps?); it might give some hints to where the problem may reside. Testing from various sources, with different formats and using different A/V output drivers might also be worth while, though, I suppose you might have played around with those already. You could also try a different cabling set-up, if possible.
To me, though, it looks like it might be a hardware resource/quality limitations issue, with references to your sollution on Win7; do you disable the laptop monitor in this scenario? It might be useful to use ‘top’, or similar, to monitor your system.
