And so i changed the default Unity Desktop to Gnome 3 Desktop a few days back. I noticed that the VLC on Gnome 3 video playback lags by a few fps, I also tried with the default video player on Ubuntu 12.04 but there's no luck. After digging the internet for a fix or a work around, I learned that there is a new Gnome Guidelines for System Tray messaging. What happened here is that Gnome decapitated the System Tray notification area, meaning Gnome will not support some applications that has messaging on Gnome3's System Tray (that sucks right?) well anyway here at the list of applications from Gnome's website: Message Tray Compatibility.

Going back to my problem, the trick here is to unchecked some of the settings on VLC, too bad this only works on VLC. I tried with different movie players and it still lags maybe there's something we need to tweak in order to play all videos on different video players (I'll try to research more on this ).

Here are the steps to make VLC run smoothly on Gnome3:

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences.

2. In Interface Tab.

• Uncheck Show systray icon.
• Uncheck Systray popup when minimized.