Published at LXer:

As I have written in Phoronix articles many times before, my particular recommendation for those HTPC users or anyone just watching many movies/videos on their Linux desktop is to use NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with the proprietary driver. NVIDIA VDPAU is widely-supported and tends to "just work" on any modern Linux distribution, the binary driver, and all popular Linux multimedia software like XBMC, VLC, and MPlayer. NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix does a very good job at offloading the video decode work to the graphics hardware rather than the CPU. Even a very low-end GeForce GPU can get the job done.

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