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I'm running ubuntu 16.04, and I have a RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650] graphics card. It's fine, except that when I play video it usually locks up Ubuntu.

I can SSH in at this point and and kill the video player but it makes no difference; it's like it's done something to the window manager. Samba, virtualbox etc are all still running fine but I have to power cycle the box if I'm to do anything visually again; the mouse and keyboard do nothing (so no control-alt-f1).

I suppose I'll have to buy a graphics card which is more compatible with this version of Ubuntu (I understand some sort of decision was taken where this card will never be supported properly on recent versions of Ubuntu despite not being anywhere near as old as other hardware I'm happily running ubuntu) but I was wondering if there was some way of preventing whatever it is that's crashing from being run; ie, is there some sort of software emulation of video which doesn't crash? I don't mind if the result would be unusably slow as I don't watch video on this box, but it would be nice to not have to reboot if I accidentally double click on a video file. Oddly, video never crashes when run from a browser.

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  • I think it is a driver or video player problem. I use VLC on 16.04 and have a similar problem. My graphics card is Nvidia. Also see the related question askubuntu.com/q/778933/255257
    – Dante
    Dec 19, 2016 at 13:57

2 Answers 2

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As stated here, bottom of section 3,

Those of you on Radeon device should be aware that the standard AMD driver is NOT SUPPORTED in 16.04 at this time. A future point release is expected to bring support for the new AMDGPU driver. Expect a regression in system performance if you upgrade.

You will probably either have to find some open-source unofficial driver, or just unplug or disable your GPU, as it's not going to help 16.04 with video playback.

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    Well, yes -that's what I read and it's what I'm trying to do, hence the question. But how?
    – user12753
    Dec 19, 2016 at 14:47
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Best answer seems to be to associate all video file formats with VLC, then load VLC and select Tools -> Preferences -> Input/Codecs and set Codecs:Hardware-accelerated decoding to Disable.

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  • That essentially disables the video card for playing videos, but nothing else. You might (or might not, depending on where the problem is) have problems with graphics acceleration, such as on the Unity desktop. Dec 19, 2016 at 15:07

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