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

[Stroller]

On 10 April 2012, at 12:26, 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.

Have you tried net-misc/youtube-dl ?

This may not be a direct answer to your question, but youtube-dl allows you to select the video's encoding and quality (-f and -F options) and just grab the video as an MP4 or .flv file.

You may find the video plays more smoothly without the overhead (??) of being played in a browser (or by a browser plig-in). When you've downloaded with youtube-dl you can then just double-click on it and open in mplayer or vlc - at least you get the choice of video players that way, and you may find one of them smoother and less sputtery.

I'm sceptical over the benefits of upgrading a 4 year old PC (short of ripping most all the guts out and starting again). I know the industry has currently settled on PCIe, but haven't bus speeds increased in the last 4 years? Are all the latest cards compatible with your Dell? If not, then you'll probably end up buying an older model, and then that will be sub-optimal when you want to upgrade your motherboard in a year's time.

I'm sorry if this reply is unhelpful, but you give a lot of information, and perhaps that means you might be open to considering alternative solutions to the core problem.

Stroller.