I'm installing Ubuntu on my friends laptop. An LG R400 with ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 graphics drivers. On Windows Vista which runs pretty slow the HD flash videos 1080p on Youtube vimeo and other places work with no problems, but on Ubuntu i can not really play videos above 480p Above that they are lagging. That annoys me because i know he will use them, and how am i supposed to convince him that Ubuntu is the way to go if it can not play the videos that windows vista can? Unity 3d is working fine so i think the graphics drivers is working, and when i download the hd videos and play as mp4 in vlc they also work fine.
lspci -nn | grep VGA shows the following:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Mobility Radeon X2300
Hope that someone can help me convince my friend that Ubuntu is rocking!
Ubuntu rocks indeed, not only rocking, but neither Ubuntu nor Windows Vista play flash videos, Adobe Flash player does, and on Vista, it has hardware acceleration. If you haven't heard about the state of flash support, check out this.
So, what can you do? Not much really. There are some limited alternatives though.
FlashVideoReplacer Firefox addon (no longer available).
HTML5.
As an afterthought, perhaps Ubuntu is not the way for your friend to go. It's up to your friend to decide.
Programs like UMPlayer and MiniTube will let you search and play youtube videos full screen, in Hi-Def and a lot better than Adobe's own flash player by using pre-installed codecs that work with your graphics card...