Smart Home Blog

The VDPAU is packaged as standalone library. It’ll be still included into proprietary nVidia drivers to avoid additional installations. As I understand it’s done to provide some generic way for communications between OS and hardware for Linux. Something similar to DirectX. Good idea in my mind but I suspect that the other producers of video adapters will promote their solutions instead of using and improving of VDPAU.

In any case, nVidia video cards is still the best option for Linux users. Especially with supporting of VDPAU which allows to play HD content even on Atom processor.

It isn’t so fresh news but still. ATI released a new version of its proprietary drivers for Linux. The 9.3 provides better options to configure display for HDTV in the ATI Catalyst Control Center. Also a few bugfixes were done with detection of display port, TV standards aspect, video playback after hibernation and dual display configuration. There is a good news for developers. They have now a way to control video card parameters from their applications using AMD Display Library SDK.

I received a positive feedback about using ATI Radeon HD3200, previous version of ATI Catalyst 9.2 and alpha version of LinuxMCE 0810. The video playback is ok now. But there is still a few issues: cursor cannot be hided without mouse and there is no way to call menu when screen server is started. Probably the new version of Catalyst drivers will solve that.

nVidia has been released another version of its proprietary *nix video drivers. 180.44 includes support for few new GPUs, fixes of OpenGL crash while running KDE4’s Plasma, a lot of VDPAU bugfixes. Traditionally there are version for Linux IA32/IA64/AMD64/EM64T, FreeBSD x86 and Solaris x64/x86. I didn’t update my LinuxMCE box since 180.18. So, tomorrow will do it. Hope it’ll improve performance during HD video playback and maybe it’ll help to get audio over HDMI (I know that it’s done under Kubuntu 8.10, but I still run 7.10).