14 DAY TRIAL // In his latest report, Canonical's Will Cooke reports on the efforts the Ubuntu Desktop team is making to enable hardware-accelerated video playback for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) by default.
According to Will Cooke, the team's goal right now is to lay the groundwork for a solution that would enable hardware-accelerated playback of video files by default, with a focus on making it work on Intel graphics cards. Suppor for Nvidia and AMD Radeon GPUs should come at a later time thanks to Canonical's new testing infrastructure.
"We’re working through all the various links in the chain to get to a situation where we can playback video using hardware acceleration by default. At the moment our focus is getting it to work on Intel graphics hardware, but there are a few issues around using Intel’s SDK with open-source LibVA," says Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical.
The Intel SDK (Software Development Kit) issue with the LibVA library should soon be resolved as Intel is currently working on a fix. In the meantime, if you're interested in following the work that's being done on enabling hardware-accelerated video playback on Intel CPUs in Ubuntu Linux, you should take a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelQuickSyncVideo.
Call-for-testing programme to be unveiled soon
In related news, Canonical announced that it will soon unveil a call-for-testing programme for Ubuntu, inviting users to take part of small and quick tests that they can regularly perform for continued feedback on the work done so far by the Ubuntu Desktop team for the upcoming release of the operating system, Ubuntu 17.10.
This will help the Ubuntu Desktop team and Canonical ensure the overall quality of the Ubuntu Desktop Live images is kept high throughout the entire development cycle, which will end on October 19, 2017, when the final release of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system hits the streets. More news on this later on.