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An update on the Intel PowerVR aka CedarView aka SGX545 aka GMA 3650 mess, after obsessively trying to repeat the success of an online user known only as "habeyusa" getting 1080i/p video working for 12 days, I've officially given up. Question: is there any online database of Linux GPU compatibility? One which is kept current by a robust continuous-deploy testing method? My current profession involves setting up continuous-deploy pipelines for massive unit testing. I'm finding that such pipelines are essential for getting and keeping complex systems like this working. In a nutshell, Intel put out one or two revisions of a proprietary driver (from its subcontractor Imagination Technologies), which only got partially integrated with Ubuntu upstream. A couple of other distros tried to integrate this as well, but it never went into any kind of continuous-integration pipeline. The net result is that the distros (with their patch-update repos) have advanced several months forward, and it's well-nigh impossible to repeat the steps posted by an anonymous Intel engineer for getting this working under Ubuntu 12.04-i386. There were a couple of key pieces of info missing, so I can't readily figure out the Precise (pardon the pun) version numbers of all the packages, sub-packages and tarballs needed. In any event, his posting only addressed getting mplayer to work, not MythTV which has its own set of integration problems. A modern installation on this platform would require getting both OpenGL and VAAPI working. I now have lots of relatively-useless knowledge of those technologies, but in the end could not get full-HD video running. Meanwhile for further reading here are a couple of interesting postings: * Linus Torvalds and the Chinese government gave NVidia a huge middle-finger earlier this year, now that NVidia's decided it can make more money on Android devices than desktop computers. Link: http://www.inquisitr.com/266116/nvidia-loses-10-million-gpu-order-over-awful-linux-support/ * A 10-month-old posting on Phoronix suggests Intel has decided to dump the Imagine Technologies PowerVR GPU entirely. Link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1NDU Now that I'm in the market for a new low-power frontend machine, I'm at a loss as to how to do my shopping. Online information is too scattered, too old, and too unreliable; I can't just go to newegg.com and click on "new MythTV frontend". My 2009-vintage Acer Revo 1600 boxes are still going strong, compared to the crap coming out today. -rich
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