Poor video performance on older HP laptop

[lumbercis]

Hi all,

I've been having some problems with video performance on my HP Pavilion n5470 running F11. Basically when I try to watch a youtube video for instance, the video doesn't play smoothly but jumps from frame to frame.

PC specs:
Processor: Athlon 1 GHz
Installed Memory: 256 MB (SDRAM)
Hard Drive: 20 GB IDE
Display 15 in. TFT Active Matrix
Motherboard Bus Speed 100 MHz
Memory: Installed RAM 256 MB
Installed Cache Memory 256 KB
Hard Drive Capacity 20 GB
Display Tech TFT Active Matrix
Display Resolution 1024 x 768
Video Memory 8 MB
Video Card: Trident Cyberblade XP (rev63)

I have read somewhere that video performance is often improved by using the proprietary driver for the video card in question. The original drivers all seem to be written for Windows. Is there a way to use the Windows driver on my machine rather than the generic "trident" driver that F11 uses?

If not, what steps could I take to try to improve video playback on my machine? Is my RAM or the video card itself a limiting factor?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
J.

[kjans]

The flash player seems to have higher hardware requirements than your computer has.
Adobe flash player requirements
My own experience is that I have a 1GHz machine with 512 MB RAM and 32 MB ati card, running windows XP and Youtube still skips frames. Also, my second experiance is that mostly Windows drivers have better FPS than the Linux ones on the same card.

And I have not heard of proprietary drivers for Trident cards. In fact I don't believe that there are any proprietary Linux drivers for hardware that is so old.

EDIT: I heard of that Youtube has a experimental HTML5 support. I don't know it's minimum requirements, but maybe they are lower and will work for you. Haven't found how to enable this on Youtube though.

[lumbercis]

Ahh, well, I can live with that. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything setup wise. I'll look in to the HTML5 thing. Appreciate the help.

J.

[Dan]

(Moved to EOL)