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

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes and no. You can use GPU acceleration for video decoding. I'd
suggest the low-end nVidia GeForce cards, as any nVidia card from the
last couple years will do hardware h264 decode (which even Linux
versions of Flash will take advantage of, now), but I don't think the
novou drivers implement vdpau support yet.

My favorite is the nVidia GeForce 210; cheap and effective. I picked
up a couple of them retail for $50 USD. At the time, I think there
were PCI versions available, but I don't know if that's still true.

-- 
:wq