Everybody has different hardware etc., but for what it's worth, OpenSUSE never let me down. So if you feel like you have another go in you before you completely give up on Linux, try that maybe.

As for the videos, if you aren't already, use VLC, it seems to have a trillion obscure codecs baked into it.. I would go so far to say if it doesn't play in VLC, there is either a problem elsewhere, or it's not a video file.