Ubun to the rescue.

Continuing in HTPC territory, to maintain my guise of a technology blogroll.

Skipping the details, I've tried each combination of CPU and video card, I've used 32 and 64 Bit versions of windows and Ubuntu from a Live CD and nothing promising has shown up.

It wasn't actually an exhaustive test of all combinations, but it was enough to exhaust me nonetheless and at best I'm getting a single-core and no GPU assist on playback - which can't cope with 1080p and stutters. The one combination that worked was my quad with the fanless 9400, using DXVA. While I'm happy for that video card to be used in a media centre, I don't want to put by quad core PC out to pasture for watching the occasional film and use the slower Duo every day.

Expectations lowered sufficiently I booted back into WinXP to come up with a plan and was greeted with a virus. It was one of *those* days, so I evaluated my resources and options. With nothing to lose and everything to gain I took a punt and pressed Alt-F4. Permanently. Using the LiveCD I replaced "C:\" with "swap" and "/" and let Ubuntu out of the box. Begone, Windoze and never darken my desktop again.

A fresh Ubuntu 9.10 install needs a few things. First off, it needs Google Chrome which installed fine. It also asked for 224MB of extras from the Ubuntu update manager so I made the executive decision that it knows more than I do and I should just trust the advice of an expert. Besides at 50mpbs, 224MB installs pretty quick. At this point I've got nothing to lose that I haven't already lost and my 1080p media doesn't play for missing codecs.

Next off Ubuntu told me it wanted propriety video drivers, giving me the option of the nvidia 17x and 18x package, so I picked the more recent 18x driver. I think it was the illusion of choice, but I didn't have anything to go on except nVidia thinks the new ones are better and who am I to argue?

Well, my 1080p still doesn't play but a little R&D deliver MediBuntu which looks reasonably promising. http://www.medibuntu.org/

This looks like it gets me ffMpeg and avcodec so after a successful apt-get I fire up Totem and..

Nothing. But this is why I installed Ubuntu BEFORE doing to research, because now I've got something to play for.

This website told me to Install Ubuntu Restricted Extras
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Which I did and now my 1080p does play, it stutters in the same way I'd expect if it was CPU bound but at least I get h246 in my eyes and AC3 in my ears.

Now the game is afoot. I'm sure the Intel E6600 CPU and nVidia 9400 are capable of providing perfect 1080p playback, so now I'm software limited. Are the drivers good enough, and is Ubuntu just going to be the same problem with a different boot screen?