I spent a couple of hours getting a proprietary software H.264 codec working in Linux and even published a writeup to help others. A day later I learned from one of the people I sourced in my article that nVidia started releasing Linux drivers last November for the hardware high definition decoders found on the 8xxx series of video cards as well as a customized version of mplayer to support the new drivers.

A mixture of emotions came across as I realized I wasted an entire day on a software decoder when a hardware solution was available for $30 to $40. The software solution was fairly disappointing, so I decided to try one of these new cards, an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT, to see if it provided a better solution. It took some work with my setup, but the results were worth it.

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I’ve got an old Pentium D 920. Over two years old, with the right ffmpeg options for mplayer and frame dropping enabled, this CPU can still play H.264 720p video at amazing quality in Linux. However, all 1080p and 1080i60 (camcorder M2TS files) choke horribly. The video drags, audio skips and the video is totally unwatchable. In my search for a better video codec, I came across CoreAVC, a closed source commercial codec for Windows, as well as the coreavc-for-linux project: an attempt to use those closed source drivers with various media players in Linux.

Unfortunately, the installation documents for coreavc-for-linux were months old, out-of-date and had few corrections for new bugs. The following are some of the common errors I found as well as the solutions I’ve found to get the trail version of the CoreAVC codec working on my Gentoo Linux system.
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