In this guide we will see how to enable the VDPAU hardware acceleration in flash player on Ubuntu and derivatives for any Nvidia, Intel and AMD GPU.
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is the name of a library that allows to assign a part of the workload of decoding and post-processing a video to the GPU; this features can be used even for Flash playback.
In Ubuntu the native support for the VDPAU hardware acceleration is not active by default, but it can ben enabled with the following procedure:
Multimedia
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How to play DVD on Ubuntu
Surely most of you have some, if not many, movies on DVD and you are used to watch them on the PC.
Unfortunately, due to licensing Ubuntu is released only with free codecs for multimedia playback and therefore it requires few additional steps to have the codecs for proprietary formats (DVD, mp3, avi, etc.).
Update Mplayer on Ubuntu
Since Ubuntu is not a rolling-release distribution, programs like Mplayer do not receive any major update, beside bug-fixes, until each new release of the distribution itself.
Here it is a guide on how to keep Mplayer updated on Ubuntu.