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? -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org>
