Fortunately for us, the webbook can indeed do better, with just a little guidance. This version of the OpenChrome driver doesn’t do a particularly good job of handling the X Video extension. The point of the X Video extension is to allow the main CPU to hand over all the complicated video decoding to the graphics card. Basically the CPU says to the graphics card, “Please do some video decoding, you can draw it in this rectangle here, the data is over there, get on with it whilst I go do some other stuff”. Well that is great in theory, but in practice the graphics card just isn’t pulling it’s weight at the moment. Luckily for us the CPU of the webbook is nippy enough to do all the decoding itself (although it would probably struggle on HD content). We just have to tell the media player not to attempt to hand off the drawing to the lazy graphics card. Press alt+F2 to bring up the run program dialog then type in

gstreamer-properties

This will bring up a settings tool as shown below. On the video tab change the plugin from automatic to X Window System (No Xv). Now try playing your video again and you should have it playing back in glorious technicolour.

There will be better graphics drivers for the webbook, probably in an automatic update at some stage.