Enable acceleration in Flash with ATI cards

[cobito]

Flash player, the plugin used by practically all multimedia portals, uses the nVidia VDPAU API to provide it with hardware video decoding, an important function when playing high-definition video, especially on netbooks and low-powered PCs.

To use hardware decoding on Ati graphics cards, you must activate VDPAU with these cards.

This works with PROPRIETARY drivers and has been tested on Mageia 3. Other distros might have different package names and use different directories.

First of all, you must enable VA-API acceleration, which is the API that Ati uses for hardware video decoding in Linux. To do this, we install these packages:

· vaapi-driver-vdpau
· vaapi-driver-fglrx

Remember that you must have the tainted and non-free repositories enabled.

Once this is installed, we have to install a driver that acts as a bridge between VA-API and VDPAU in a universal way. A few months ago, a driver called libvdpau-va-gl appeared, but there is no package for Mageia. So we download the package for Debian:

· For i586: http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libv/libvdpau-va-gl/libvdpau-va-gl1_0.1.0-2_i386.deb

· For x64: http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libv/libvdpau-va-gl/libvdpau-va-gl1_0.1.0-2_amd64.deb

Once downloaded, we open the package with a file manager like ARK and extract the files contained in data.tar.gz > usr > lib > i386-linux-gnu > vdpau:

· libvdpau_va_gl.so
· libvdpau_va_gl.so1

The destination of these files will be /usr/lib/vdpau/

Once extracted, we go to /etc/profile.d/ and create a file called vdpau_vaapi.sh and edit it with this text:

#!/bin/sh
export VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl

We save the file, restart the PC and it's ready.

To check that hardware decoding is being used, we can view any YouTube video, right-click on the video and click on "Nerd statistics". There should appear software video rendering, HARDWARE video decoding. If that appears, it's working.

[Yorus]

Thanks for the contribution, I didn't know about "statistics for nerds" xD.