HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux
This is very cool. Granted the rest of the system was fairly new they used a very cheap CPU and video card and successfully were able to playback HD video without much issue. Once this makes its way into released applications (right now it’s all in patches) the general Linux community will see a nice performance boost.
It’s fairly conclusive that VDPAU does an excellent job of offloading the video decoding and processing from the CPU and over to the GPU. With H.264, MPEG, and WMV3 we had incredible improvements when using this newly introduced support found in NVIDIA’s Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD drivers. VDPAU does not require a high-end NVIDIA graphics card to work well, but even the $30 GeForce 8400GS had done its job and with no active cooling would be a great candidate for a HTPC. The AMD Sempron LE-1150 with a thermal envelope of just 45W could be cooled easily with minimal system fans also making it a great buy for a media PC.