Hmm! As I suspected, that link implies that VAAPI requires the legacy driver to be installed - which' of course' doesn't work with any recent xorg or kernels. It seems like it can be patched to work with some more recent kernels, but all the documentation seems to be distribution specific (mostly RedHat).

The open-source drivers rely on VDPAU, which isn't supported on the HD4000 chipset. And since this is a laptop, I'm stuck with the AMD graphics chip. Grrr!

Next time it will be Intel for me, as they DO provide good support for open-source, and I don't need 3D gaming performance. I only need HD video, which the AMD chipsets support, but the drivers don't! Go figure!

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Pete

Depends on which videochip you have. All chips from the HD4000 series except the 4200, 4250, 4860 and 4890 are supported, so if you have a middle class chip you have luck.

lspci identifies it as an RS880M (HD 4225/4250), so it looks like I'm still stuffed!



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Pete

In my situation, i have a bit old videocard, who i get, when purchase second hand asus mobo with c2d e4400 processor and ram for my home server. then i found, i was parallelly run seti@home on this machine. i too found, use of GPU is far more efficiency, than CPU on some seti tasks. i also found, hd4350 has supported to use in seti@home.
as so i want to not waste that energy and materials, who is used to make that card, and also not waste my money, if i can get already working solution with that card, who i already have.
and card itself not be very bed - it is low consumption ( about 20 watts on full load), and crunch AP tasks about twice faster than cpu, and the same time practically not load cpu. i think, it is well.
yes, i can purchase new card, who is faster, and do more GFLOPS per watt, but why to purchase new, if old is still ok, and do its functions?
i understand, nowadays world is oriented to buy,buy,buy, no think about ecology and so on - consume, consume, concume.
but i do not want that way.
get and view good movie about that - "WALL-E" - it is too give material for retink our nowadays fashion...

I see people use old hardware as a point which isn't really valid imho. Because drivers and hardware mature. The point they try to get across isn't really true for the hardware which the TS would buy. That's my point

I do agree that it's smart to wait getting the latest and greatest card(s) if you only use Linux, drivers need to mature first. Vendors do the Windows drivers first, way more people use Windows. I personally would get the latest card never the less when I buy new hardware. I use Windows too and take it for granted that it won't be perfect for Linux at first. It's more future proof.

Unfortunately my card was in a laptop and is part of the motherboard, so I'm stuck with what the manufacturer provided!

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Pete

Some cards also for vdpau may require additional firmware. Nouveau does but I think Patrick ships the firmware with the kernel packages, however you can extract it from the Nvidia drivers using a tool if it's not. I think ArchLinux has a wiki on it, or had one. Nouveau's wiki has(had) a link.

The AMD and Intel firmware should be in the kernel firmware package already.