Yesterday I received my nettop unit. I think I read that hardware decoding for video is not supported yet, correct? using the video player, it is impossible to have the device do something else at the same time. for example, I can't properly play video from files residing on my home server. Is it planned to support the HW decoder?

If the video player you are using is totem it should be using the VPU via our gstreamer plugins. we don't have the acceleration working with other players.

Also depending on the network speed and method used for file sharing it may be slowing things down a bit. try copying one of the videos to the local disk and try playing it from there and see if it makes a difference.

I did do that and I'm using Totem, the standard player that came with the installed Ubuntu Maverick distribution. First problem I encountered was the player requesting plug-ins for .mpg and .mp4 files. The player chose to install g-streamer and ffmpeg plug-ins.
Playing a file from the local disk, still shows over 90% CPU usage. This can only be the case if HW acceleration is not used. Would you agree?
I'm wondering if the specific Maverick version for this unit was not killed by auto-updates. Should I re-install the specific image?

UPDATE:
I re-installed with latest image from this site. Nothing changes: the video performance is very bad. 100% CPU on an MP4 file for the local SSD. Am really disappointed with the SW on this EFICA MX smattop. I'm convinced this chip can do a lot better, but there is a lack of proper drivers for linux. I'm going to try the android demo to see how that performs. I'd assume the chip was built for that in the 1st place.
In its current state, it is unusable as desktop replacement. Even web browsing with firefox is rather slow.

Since you are already trying different images could you try my squeeze desktop image and tell me how that works out? I think it performs a tad bit better than maverick myself. I'm only asking this so I can perhaps compare it to maverick and see what's going on there.

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2262

also one thing to keep in mind is the acceleration is only really for up to 720p videos. some higher res vids will play just fine though but not all.


using my squeeze image right now playing some videos and looking at htop most videos use around 30 to 45% cpu and at least one used between 40 and 70% it all depends on how the videos are encoded.

anyway please give it a shot and let me know if it's still a problem on my squeeze image because that image has improvements to the hardware/multimedia support packages that I've been working on for a while now. (mostly PulseAudio config stuff)

Also if it is a free video could you point me at the video file that is causing you trouble?

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a go.
The video is a personal copy of a DVD, so can't share in order not to violate fair use policy. It is a H.264 encoded stream at 720x576 (SD resolution).

i'm not a gnome fan thus i tried to use a different gstreamer based video player like 'xfce/parole' but i got this error:

As far as I know the gstreamer plugins were only tested with totem (and perhaps a shell script) I can't get it to play anything with parole either. but If I do manage to get it working I will let you know.

I might run this by the guy that did our gstreamer plugins but he is quite busy on other things at the moment. I don't think totem pulls in all of gnome so I would just use that for the moment.

Would be nice to have it working with other gstreamer based players though.