[gentoo-user] Re: PCI video cards, hardware accel, upported by open-source drivers?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/04/12 14:26, Walter Dnes wrote:
>    With the recent speed bump on my ADSL service from 5 megabps to 6
> (don't laugh), I can now download 1080p Youtube Flash videos almost fast
> enough to keep up.  E.g. a 20 or 25 second headstart will allow me to
> play a 5 minute video before it has to buffer.  On some html5 videos
> (Firefox with USE="webm"), The download is actually a touch faster than
> the playback, and there's no buffering at all.
>
>    Some of you may remember my struggles to get my 4-year-old Dell to
> eventually display hockey games on NHL GameCenter even at the lowest
> available speed using the onboard Intel GPU.  Well, I can play the HD
> Youtube videos with the "small player" or "large player", but fullscreen
> is hopeless.  The onboard GPU can't keep up.  So I'm looking at getting
> a PCI video card.  Any relatively new PCI video card that is supported
> by an open-source driver, including hardware acceleration?  Any
> experiences, good/bad/so-so?

This is a CPU problem, not GPU.  Try to install 
media-video/smplayer-0.8.0 (older versions don't support YouTube), and 
open the YouTube video link in it.  In the preferences ("performance" 
section) you can select the quality at which to open the videos.