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I installed 18.04 on a Dell Latitude E6520. According to the specs (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/latit/en/latitude-e6520-specsheet.pdf) this machine has 2 video cards, an Intel® HD Graphics 3000 and an NVIDIA® NVSTM 4200M Discrete Graphics. According to inxi -Fzx, these are correctly detected. (section follows here:) 

Graphics:  Card-1: Intel 2nd Generation Core Integrated Graphics Ctr
           bus-ID: 00:02.0
           Card-2: NVIDIA GF119M [NVS 4200M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
           Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.6 ) drivers: i915,nouveau
           Resolution: 1920x1080@60.01hz
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Sandybridge Mobile
           version: 3.3 Mesa 18.0.5 Direct Render: Yes

When I start a DVD with a menu-system in VLC, the selection areas where I float, are either speckled or greyed, but never invisible. Is this a problem with VLC or with the video driver of Ubuntu? (Sorry, I don't know how to post a screendump)

abu_bua
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Jan80TRS
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1 Answers1

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VLC is often performing well, but here are a few things to try in order to improve the performance (to play video).

  • You can try with a proprietary nvidia driver for the nvidia card. See this link (and scroll down to 'The next step is to install an nvidia proprietary driver...')

  • You can install more (and maybe better) codecs and other restricted software to play multimedia with the command

    sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

    Then you can also try with the default video player, totem in standard Ubuntu.

  • The computer was powerful when new, but is getting old, so it might work better with an Ubuntu community flavour with a light desktop environment, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu MATE or Xubuntu. These flavours have light-weight video players too, lighter than that of standard Ubuntu. The lightest flavour, Lubuntu, comes with gnome-mpv in 18.04 LTS.

sudodus
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    Well, the problem has gone away. I suppose the multiple updates fixed the problem. I will, however, take your recommendation into account and add the 'restricted extras'. As far as performance and speed is concerned: the machine is equipped with an SSD (500G) and performs well. It even runs the latest Windows 10 without problems - installed in dual-boot with Grub - even though the machine is formally not supported by Dell for W10. And we all know that W10 is heavier on the hardware than Ubuntu, even the latest and full version 18.04. – Jan80TRS Sep 09 '18 at 09:28