A/V playback stuttery and getting worse - how to troubleshoot?

pickarooney

I've been having a problem with intermittent stuttering in video and audio playback since upgrading to Maverick (it also happened when I briefly installed Lucid). It started out as teh odd skip every 20 minutes or so but now it can happen 5 or 6 times in 10 minutes when watching a film.

I've tried:

reformatting and clean installing
using a half-dozen players
installing every codec I could think of (only after the normal ones wouldn't help)
diangosing my 3 hard drives (the problem occurs on them all and they're not in a RAID setup)
changing then changing back my video drivers
disabling pulseaudio and ubuntuone-sync (these were not installed in my previous, working setup)
looking at every relevant log file (mplayer, smplayer, demsg...) I know of

I'm out of ideas. Going back to Jaunty is the only solution I'm pretty sure will work but it's not exactly ideal. It will be a few months at least before I'm able to install a completely new distro.

loldog

Have you tried this fix:

http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9961868&postcount=29

It worked for the guy in this thread.

.

pickarooney

I don't know if I have that file as I disabled pulseadio and am just using ALSA. I might check for an alternative kernel though as someone in that thread had luck doing that.