lspci is a command. It will print the list of PCI devices in your system.

For instance, on an Optimus system there are two VGA devices, Intel and nVidia. Intel is the main graphics, nVidia is helper - it does the heavy lifting with 3D acceleration. But it cannot output anything by itself, it uses Intel chip to draw to the screen. If you have hybrid graphics there may be something similar going on and setting it up will be vastly different from plain nVidia setup. I'm just speculating here, I have no experience with such hardware, and there is no telling without looking at your lspci output, Xorg log would be subject of interest, too.

Thanks, yea i kinda know its more than capable of playing hd videos, its actually capable of playing decent 3d games too, thats why i bought it cause it was one of the best integrated graphics cards you could get at the time. Its always in the back of your head "hmm i wonder if its just too slow to play modern flash videos" but i think you as well as my previous experience with this mobo confrm its more than capable of hd video playback without being crappy fps and artefacts. As for audio, I have tried using the dvi port with the 3.5 audio out and an hdmi outputting both audio and video, both are choppy internet video =/ whats worse is directtv.com doesnt even support linux. I just came back and started it up again, seems its really only fullscreen video thats affected, and only some sites, hulu.com seems to be working ok, youtube videos are laggy, kinda like low fps but also the video is lagging behind the audio. Hulu.com still has pretty bad screen tearing though so i wonder if this is a refresh rate issue? i dont think that would cause the low fps but idk maybe.

Oh ok, here ya go;

00:00.0 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] LPC Bridge (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] SMBus (rev a1)
00:01.2 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:01.3 Co-processor: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] Co-Processor (rev a2)
00:01.4 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:02.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a1)
00:02.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a1)
00:04.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a1)
00:04.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a1)
00:06.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] IDE (rev a1)
00:07.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP72XE/MCP72P/MCP78U/MCP78S High Definition Audio (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] PCI Bridge (rev a1)
00:09.0 SATA controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0584 (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:12.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:14.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] PCI Bridge (rev a1)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor HyperTransport Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Miscellaneous Control
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Link Control
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C77 [GeForce 8200] (rev a2

My xorg log is huge, so i saved it to a text file and attached it;

Attached Files

nvidianforce730aonmint.txt (54.4 KB, 5 views)

OK, I do not see more than one VGA device. Looking up at nVidia the latest driver that works with GeForce 8200 is 340.96. What exactly is the reason you want the proprietary driver?

On a side note, everything else is very fast, rivals my windows 10 system which has like double the computing power or more. If it werent for the issues id be very happy with linux mint.

Only because the open source one has video playback issues. And yea that driver shows up in the driver manager but when I install it the system won't boot, just freezes and I have to reinstall the os. The issues are different, its like some videos are kind of ok, but if they are they get bad screen tearing, other videos are laggy and stutter, others are like low fps but consistent. Also it seems to be only a fullscreen issue, windowed videos seem to play ok. It is not really intermittent though, I wanna make that clear, its every video I play has some issue.

Your card is capable of following:
You may get it working better with nouveau, but you have to make sure the firmware is loaded (if needed for your card).

Nouveau is installed ATM so halfway there haha, how do I go about making sure the firmware is loaded? And how do I know if its needed?

I think you should see it in dmesg, search for firmware.

ok you’ve lost me a bit, I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to be looking for, here's the dmesg readout;

Attached Files

dmesg.txt (27.3 KB, 7 views)

I do not see nVidia firmware request in dmesg.

Can you describe better how proprietary driver crashes your box? Can you still switch to another console and log in?

Yea when I install the recommended proprietary driver it seems to install ok then I restart and it boots to either a black screen, or gets to the desktop then as soon as I do anything its like the display driver stops working, the whole GUI freezes and I can't do anything, and get like weird artifacts, and images that look like magic eye kinda. Classic display crash id say, I've seen it happen before when I've overheated a graphics card and the system locked up, or with a bad display driver and I get a windows error saying "display driver has stopped", seems like the same thing here, just graphics locking up.

You may be out of luck with proprietary driver, using even older driver may not work with current Xorg. You can try indeed.

I have a laptop here with GT218M, using nouveau (latest blob that supports it is 340.x).
As you can see, acceleration is enabled with nouveau. ^^
... and here you can see what decoding is supported by hardware, working with nouveau.

Next thing is to make sure your player uses vdpau as output to utilize hardware decoding.