Ubuntu 17.10 Video Acceleration Progress, New Unity-Session Package

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 24 June 2017 at 07:49 AM EDT. 10 Comments
UBUNTU
We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area.

Canonical's Will Cooke reported in the latest Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update that they have a proof-of-concept working with Intel VA-API by making use of the Intel QuickSyncVideo support paired with GStreamer. They are able to enjoy H.264 4K video playback with around 3% CPU usage on Haswell as well as playable 4K H.264/HEVC too, for Skylake and newer.

Sadly, it doesn't look like Ubuntu in the near-term is planning to ship with out-of-the-box Radeon video acceleration via OpenMAX/VDPAU state trackers in Gallium3D.

In other Ubuntu desktop news this week, ubuntu-session has been migrated into a new unity-session. Users on Ubuntu 17.10 still desiring the Unity 7 experience will be able to install the unity-session package from universe. They also are still working on their LivePatch service, better Snap integration, and more.

The latest Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update can be found via insights.ubuntu.com.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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