Ubuntu Is Finally Looking At Shipping Accelerated Video Playback Support

[caligula]

Edit: install the utility "vdpauinfo" to check your installation. It's very small and it will show what your card support. I think it work with the proprietary and opensource implementations of VDPAU.

There's some problem with the utility and NVIDIA proprietary drivers (381.22):

$ vdpauinfo
display: :0.0   screen: 0
libva info: VA-API version 0.40.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_35
libva info: VA-API version 0.40.0
...
Maximum number of clients reached Floating point exception (core dumped)

$ ls -l /usr/lib/dri/*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   22584 30. 5. 20:07 /usr/lib/dri/dummy_drv_video.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      18 18. 8.  2014 /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so -> vdpau_drv_video.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  101240 18. 8.  2014 /usr/lib/dri/vdpau_drv_video.so*

I just switched back to nvidia after realizing nouveau leads to hangups every two hours. Nouveau also caused some weird flickering with two monitors connected. According to xrandr, one of the monitors supports only 60 Hz @ 1920x1080 and the other 59.95 Hz. Maybe this is the cause of that issue.

edit: Ok my problem was VDPAU_DRIVER env variable. Set it to nvidia, works now.

[89c51]

With the majority of media being "consumed" through the browser if firefox doesn't start support VA-API stuff like that matter little.

And mozilla doesn't give much fucks about Linux in general.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

it really doesn't take a high end CPU to get smooth playback any more. You can do smooth software decode HD video with a single Cortex A9 core.

Someone forgot about battery usage difference between hardware and software decoding.

[bug77]

With the majority of media being "consumed" through the browser if firefox doesn't start support VA-API stuff like that matter little.

And mozilla doesn't give much fucks about Linux in general.

Desktop Linux is ~3% of the market. Keep that in mind when trying to figure out how much attention companies should pay to Linux.
Take whatever they spare as a bonus and be thankful.
Also in this particular case keep in mind Mozilla a non-profit, gutted by the advent of Chrome and still trying to do their best to respect user privacy.