Choppy Video Playback with Intel GMA-500 Chipset

I’ve recently installed Xubuntu-14.04 on my VAIO-P netbook with Intel GMA-500 graphics chipset. I had several problems (as expected because of GMA-500/Poulsbo) and fortunately I was able to resolve most of them.

The last remaining problem to achieve an ideal experience is video playback quality: videos play choppy and laggy. I’ve tried several video players, including the default Parole, GNOME Videos (Totem) and VLC. The first two are the same and have choppy-laggy playbacks. VLC can do nothing and just hangs!

I’m testing with medium quality (480p) MP4 videos, which should be able to play fine. In Windows-7, even HD (720p) videos can be somewhat played (though not very smooth) but there is no problem with 360p or even 480p videos.

Note: I’ve been installing and using Ubuntu/Xubuntu on this machine since 10.10 and this is not a new problem with 14.04. In the past the problem was simply because there was no fine performing driver for GMA-500/Poulsbo graphics. But from 13.04 on-wards, many problems are gone or can be resolved easily, as I have done so myself.

So I was wondering if there is a solution for this?

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Note-2: I don’t know if this is related information but I also had choppy audio playback (both for videos and audio files), and I was able to resolve it using the solution suggested here, which was adding tsched=0 to the following line in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-udev-detect

This solved the audio playback problem both for audio and video files. Now, the only remaining problem is the choppy video playback.

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UPDATE: Surprisingly, Totem is now playing videos fine! I don’t know what caused it to work because I didn’t work on the issue since yesterday and suddenly it’s working today! Although Parole is still unable to play smoothly and it’s exactly as before: choppy and laggy.

I’ll be using Totem (GNOME Videos) for now, but still I appreciate if anyone can help me understand what solved the problem on Totem, and how to solve it on Parole to.