World: r3wp

Vladimir, video works very well on Linux, but it is not HW accelerated 
AFAIK. The ATI driver seems to have some support of it (but I'm not 
really sure, just getting XVideo support working took many days...), 
but I'm not aware of any video player taking advantage of that.

Petr, if you are writing your own video player, maybe you can do 
something, but don't expect it to be easy (well, maybe you can just 
stick to one specific version of the driver). Why do you want to 
do this? Isn't software playback good enough? 720p H264 works fine 
on this machine which is an old Athlon XP 2600+. Do you really need 
1080p? If so, isn't a cheap laptop MB able to give you that in software 
already?

Gabriele - I did rather extensive read on the minimal config of the 
thing, and it is like that:


- we are looking for embedded solution, we are space limited for 
our device, so no place for external gfx card either

- forget 1080p, unless you are about to use monstroze performance 
CPU, which will be power hog in a kiosk system

- so - you have to use HW, which contains codecs directly - ATI 680G 
chipset is minimum, 780 or 790 is beeter. nVidia 8200 or 9400 (Ion 
platform), VIA S3 500 family, Intell Poulsbo chipset

- with above, you don't need so much powerfull CPU, dualCore Atom 
would be able to play your video

- this one page is a good reference - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-780g-chipset,1785-3.html


We are still investigating the situation. We started our work for 
Windows, but would like to move to Linux in the long run instead. 
We want to use ffmpeg project, but we will have to see, if its playback 
somehow utilises HW acceleration, or not. We will also look into 
projects like mplayer and VLC. Another problem I read about is, that 
so called HW acceleration is not always utilised. E.g. H.264 is not 
so clearly defined as mpeg2, and hence there is already plenty of 
videos, which are in MKV container, H.264, but using some super-set 
of features, which will not be supported by HW acceleration anyway 
... so - lot's of work for us :-)

AFAIK ffmpeg does not use HW acceleration. This may have changed 
though, I don't follow the project closely.

if you're targetting an HW player, you will have to encode the videos 
yourself. HW codecs are very strict.

esp. with buffer sizes.

you should probably search for linux based video players and what 
they use. if it's embedded stuff, there may be good linux support, 
but don't look for that in Ubuntu :) you'll need to talk with the 
hw makers directly.

I have hardware acceleration working finally on my pc ... 1080p with 
no CPU load :)  But only works with PowerDVD.  Nothing else can get 
HW acceleration working for me.

Using a cheap Gigabyte H4670 videocard ... and an Athlon dual core 
3000 ... so a slow CPU.

I tried mplayer, VLC, fmpeg etc etc.

Graham - you tried under linux?

So what is everyone's fav flavour of Linux now a days?

I only really follow Ubuntu these days.

Kubuntu here.

Ubuntu

It's been years, since I used Linux on a daily bases. But Ubuntu 
seems to be popular among the young people at university.

Wolvix on the client here, Syllable Server on the server

Pekr, windows

I have Gobo Linux (mentioned on Carl's blog) installed as dual boot 
here but I haven't taken the time to get my wireless working so I'm 
mostly just using windoze at this point.   I'm thinking about installing 
Debian as they are usually really good at have drivers easily usable.

unbuntu

Still, Debian. I like that you can start very small, has a very powerful 
package manager and works really great.

Gobo, Unbuntu, Debian

So far three...


I'm going to put together a list of applcation I run regularly, and 
then we can weigh this again...

Debian;  The best development model, (ala REBOL).  Deliver when ready 
and ignore the peanut gallery shouting "it's late!"  ;)  


Off-topic; Sadly, my second favourite wiki-forum-chat-combo-thingy, 
TikiWiki, is moving toward the ever useless every 6 months release 
cycle.  Not a valid model for a volunteer workforce, imho.

I have installed Ubuntu but really don't use it much.

A related question. Which desktop?

I'm using Gnome.

KDE; but I develop using GTK+ so I like the Gnomey bits too.

I REALLY don't like Gnome.  I prefer to use Enlightenment but it 
has an extremely slow developement cycle and takes a while to get 
it configured to where it is really useful.  It has it's downsides 
but I've never found a desktop/window manager that even comes close 
to what Enlightenment does.

Tikiwiki is actually a very cool concept, most people don't realize 
how cool it is....(it is a wiki that works offline).

rebol on this http://www.yoggie.com/blog/2008/11/23/yoggie-opens-up-its-miniature-hardware-firewall-why/
?

Interesting read about windows managers: http://ironphoenix.org/tril/fvwm/

Is REBOL on that Yoggie or would you like to have it on it?

I'd like to have rebol on it, I'm still waiting for the gadget to 
arrive

It has an XScale CPU. There's no REBOL for ARM Linux

Probably the most you could do is try to cross-compile ORCA for it

Pekr, you will like it, NVIDIA released new drivers with VDPAU (Video 
Decode and Presentation API for Unix) http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_180.22.html

Check this benchmark http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_vdpau&num=2

Thanks - will look into it ...

does anybody know a video player for linux that supports those apis? 
(not just nvidia, ati too)

Don't know about ATI, but NVIDIA provided the patches http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njk3MQ

Had a power outage in town, and my red hat server had to be shut 
down uncleanly since although it was protected by a UPS, the screen 
wasn't.  On rebooting, the raid array had become critical with one 
of the drives dead.  Unfortunately the good drive had developed a 
corrupted file system as well :(

Since it was IDE raid ( fasttrack 100 ) I was able to look at the 
file system using this http://www.fs-driver.orgcool tool that allows 
you to browse ext2 file systems from windows!

Lucky it wasn't ext3, hey ?

(It might have been harder to find an equivalent tool.)

is it possible to downgrade an ext3 disk to ext2?

There's a FAQ on the site about Ext3 access.

Maybe it is ext3, because read-only it behaves like ext2

Anyway, if it were ext3, it would probably have repaired itself

ext3 is identical to ex2 except for the journal, so you can access 
it as ext2 without problems for windows, it just won't update the 
journal.

i had a read/write driver installed on windows and used it regularly 
without problems.

I'm looking for an OSX driver, but there appears to be only an ext2 
one, and it will only mount my ext3 drive as read-only.

which is why I was interested in downgrading it to ext2.