14 DAY TRIAL // The Ubuntu MATE team has been proud to announce today, April 25, 2016, the general availability of the Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system for Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computers.
The Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for Raspberry Pi port, which comes hot on the heels of Lubuntu 16.04 LTS for Rasppbery 2, has been in development for the last few months. Thus, since the Beta 2 build introduced at the beginning of April, the team of developers behind this project have implemented several new tweaks and much-needed improvements.
Among these, we can notice the addition of OpemMAX IL hardware accelerated video playback to the VLC Media Player software, requiring users to enable hardware accelerated video playback via the "OpenMax IL" option implemented under Tools -> Preferences -> Video. Moreover, there is full support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B SBC.
"We have done what we can to optimise the build for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3, you can comfortably use applications such as LibreOffice and Firefox," reads today's announcement. "Ubuntu MATE 16.04 also has fully working Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi 3."
MMAL hardware accelerated video playback support added to FFMpeg
Moreover, there's now MMAL (Multi-Media Abstraction Layer) hardware accelerated video playback support added to the FFmpeg multimedia backend, and to use this new functionality with the FFplay simple and portable media player, the user needs to specify the h264_mmal codec (e.g. - ffplay -vcodec h264_mmal video.mp4).
Lastly, the minimum microSDHC card size has been increased to 8GB, and the tboplayer software has been removed. If you're interested in running the Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system on your Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or Raspberry Pi 2 Model B devices, you can download the binary image right now, which has been built with the Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker tool.