On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@gmail.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