After installing Catalyst 11.12 and studying instructions (1, 2) to enable hardware acceleration I ended up with the following command:

sudo apt-get install xvba-va-driver libva-glx1 vainfo && 

vainfo && 

vlc --verbose 2 --ffmpeg-hw video.1080p.x264.mkv

The output confirms that it's using the VA API:

avcodec decoder: Using VA API version 0.32 for hardware decoding.

But even after a reboot the video still looks choppy. There's no vlc output to indicate that the codec is having trouble, or that it's skipping frames. Any idea what could be the problem?

Using vlc 1.1.12 with default settings.

Also tried (in sequence):

1. sudo apt-get install libva-glx1


2. sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64 xserver-xorg-core


3. Rebooting

No luck yet.

Specs from /proc/cpuinfo : Intel Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz