I was having terrible tearing while playing any videos on my Ubuntu Oneiric 32-bit with Gnome 3 on my new Thinkpad T420 laptop with Intel SandyBridge Graphics Card.
I have googled around a bit, and found this only solution, haven’t investigated much behind it, but gave it a try, as I could easily revert it back.
I just added these two lines
CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True
to my “/etc/environment” file, then restarted, and surprisingly it worked out!! No more tearing whatsoever in any videos I play!
Enjoy!
Update: This also solved the video tearing issue on Precise with Gnome 3.4
Source: post #32 on this page: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1017705
Just Some Techie Notes! 
THANK YOU! You have no idea how long I have been searching for this. No body seems to understand the video tearing issue. All the solutions I’ve seen require editing xorg files and none of them work. This is the closest to a true solution I have seen. My problem is (and this is a unique situation) it doesn’t work in portrait mode. When I open “Displays” in Gnome’s settings and reorient my screen I get video tearing across the right (actually top but it’s rotated clockwise). Any possible solution to this? Thank You.
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Yes, tearing is very annoying and causes a very big dissatisfaction to me.Glad my post was useful to you, but actually the credit goes to “afonic” on the source link I provided at the end of my post. May be he can provide you with the solution for your specific situation.
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In order to stop video tearing for the poor newbies to Gnome shell or just Ubuntu 12.04 you must enable yourself to be a super user by typing in terminal.
$ sudo nautilus
Then go to system folder go to “etc” folder then scroll down to “environment” (NOTE this is not a folder but is a system file, it looks sort of like a page) Once you click on this you will see this line
“PATH=”/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games”.
Now just type below that line (or copy and paste)
CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
then type
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True
This should take care of the tearing. They don’t quite explain how to do this for newbies to LINUX at all, the writers expect every one just to know how to do this because they think everyone is a programmer.
This little patch should take care of everything. ONE LAST THING PLEASE RESTART YOUR COMPUTER AND THEN PLAY YOUR MOVIE OR YOUTUBE VIDEO.
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OH one last thing make sure you save file before restart
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