I have been battling with major tearing issues in VLC for the last week.. I found many suggestions that worked for people, but none worked for me. I ended up making a discovery .. I had the "Suspend desktop effects for full screen windows" option selected in the Desktop Effects settings. Disabling this is what fixed my tearing problems. It seems that suspending the desktop effects also suspends any tearing prevention/vsync settings you have configured on the same settings window. I can't imagine this being intended behavior as vsync isn't a desktop effect. Reproducible: Always Please excuse the uncategorized, unversioned bug report.. I'm having issues with the bug tracker. I am on 4.14.2 and that option is not available to select under KDE>General. I believe this is related to Kwin but I was not able to select the proper version on the bug tracker there either.. I have 4.11.14, but only 5.x versions are available to choose from. OS is Mint 17.2
If you unredirect (fullscreen) windows, they're no longer painted by the compositor, but paint directly into the framebuffer (tearing, if the client cannot sync) There's no bug here - the compositor isn't involved at all. Selecting the GL sink in vlc should allow sync playback and some drivers support syncing of xv/vdpau.