IOException.de

I had some issues with getting smooth video playback on my X220. I always ran into flickering, slow output or audio/video synchronization issues. Since I couldn’t find any fitting configurations and since VLC didn’t play things smoothly either, it makes sense to publish a working config with which I came up after investing some time. So this is my ~/.mplayer/config:

framedrop=1
vo=x11
cache=32768
cache-min=99
cache-seek-min=99


For a detailed explanation look through the man-page. Basically mplayer fills a 32M cache before starting playback, uses X11 as the video ouput driver, and skips frames in favor of a/v synchronization.

On another Thinkpad, a T510, mplayer -cache 32768 -cache-min 99 -cache-seek-min 99 -vo gl:swapinterval=0 -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all -vfm ffmpeg worked best.

In my case, I additionally run $ apm -H before starting the video. On my system videos play a lot smoother when apm runs in high performance mode.