Hi, does anyone have a XvBA compatibility list? I can't find it with google and i remember last year there was a wiki somewhere including a list.
I'm not sure what new laptop to get, the radeon cards in my price range seem to have better benchmarks than the the nvidias.

I either buy something with radeon 7670m, or with nvidia gt540m/gt630m. Also the radeon card seems to have a shitload of pipelines.

Right now i'm really happy with vdpau on my 5 year old laptop which supports even full 50gb bluray playback in mplayer.
Am i doing a mistake going for buggy radeon crap? A lot of people complain about them, when it comes to linux....

It comes down to this: On a laptop you will have to use the proprietary AMD drivers, since the free radeon drivers still have significant problems with power management. The same is true for the proprietary and free Nvidia/nouveau drivers.
When it comes to the quality of the proprietary drivers the Nvidia drivers are better than the AMD ones.

So you have to decide to either get video chip with (currently) better driver support (Nvidia) or to make a political decision and buy AMD, because they support open source driver development.
I personally, after all my experiences with different manufacturers, would opt for the better quality.

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If you arent playing games, intend to get an intel CPU, and use the laptop as a laptop (not a 'desktop replacement') you might be better off with just the intel intergrated video.

Even the lowest level i3 has more than enough guts to play HD media.

XvBA compatibility list? Do you mean what hardware works with XvBA or what software supports XvBA?

There's a list of which hardware decoders are present on which Radeon cards at Wikipedia's Unified Video Decoder page. There's a (short) software support list on Wikipedia's XvBA page.

Be aware that you'll only get VC1 and h264 acceleration under Linux. AMD's binary driver and/or XvBA SDK doesn't support mpeg2 or mpeg4 ASP (xvid) even though the hardware does. You don't get good quality deinterlacing either.

I've got two Intel Atom / Nvidia ION TV computers and an AMD E-350 TV computer and I have to carefully pick what I'll watch on the AMD. Progressive scan h264 works well, interlaced content flickers, xvid will play with software decoding *if* the bitrate isn't too high, etc. This is after you set up libva and the xvba-video backend so you can use XvBA through VA API, and then install a VA API version of mplayer.

I'd go Nvidia if you want video and games or Intel if you don't. AMD video just doesn't work very well under Linux and doesn't really seem to be improving. I wish it did work properly, and the hardware is there, but the driver support isn't. The only people who can fix it are AMD.

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thank you zuriel. it's not UVD compatible according to that list.
good bye AMD