Canonical makes progress on accelerated playback on Intel

Jul 7, 2017 22:12 GMT  ·  By

Canonical is working to improve the user experience of its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, and it looks like they are making quite some progress on the hardware-accelerated video playback for Intel GPUs on Ubuntu 17.10.

A few weeks ago, we informed our readers that Canonical wants to implement hardware-accelerated video playback by default in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, but they are currently focusing on Intel GPUs because they're more popular and chances are everyone has one in their PC.

Immediately after our report last month, users started asking if Canonical will also bring hardware-accelerated video playback by default for AMD Radeon and Nvidia graphics cards, and it turns out that these GPUs will be supported shortly, but not after they finish the implementation for Intel GPUs.

"We’re making progress on accelerated video playback on Intel, but we’re uncovering a lot of bugs along the way. Bugs in the Intel VA driver, bugs in Totem and bugs in GStreamer," says Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical. "While we’re focusing on Intel at the moment, Nvidia and AMD will be worked on in time."

Work on the LivePatch UI continues, automatic audio mute/pause coming soon

Canonical's work on the LivePatch UI continues, and today we've learned that the Software Properties windows has been updated to display the current state of the installed or available Live Patches, and they're also working on an authentication API to allow users to register and get a key within a Live Patch setup tool.

In other news, Will Cooke reveals the fact that the Ubuntu Desktop team are in talks with the elementary OS developers to build a new functionality for the two OSes that would mute or pause audio when a call comes in, which should be based on the PulseAudio sound server and the Cork plugin. Also, a new version of the LibreOffice Snap was recently made available for testing.