14 DAY TRIAL // Daniel Van Vugt, a member of the Ubuntu desktop team, is inviting users running the development release of the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system to test and give feedback on the video playback performance.
While Canonical already implemented hardware-accelerated video playback support for Intel CPUs in the current release of the operating system, Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), it would appear that plan on extending it to other types of processors, display servers, and video players.
In a recent call for testing, Canonical urges those who are already running the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system on their personal computers to test the video playback performance with apps like MPV or Totem (GNOME Videos), as well as the Wayland or Xorg display servers, and report any issues.
"If you are now using Ubuntu 18.04, then we are interested in hearing your feedback on whether this is working smoothly for you. We are particularly interested in hearing if you have any smoothness issues that are specific to the player (Totem or mpv), or to the session type (Wayland or Xorg)," says Daniel Van Vugt.
Several bugs have been already identified
If you discover any smoothness issue with video playback on your computer running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Canonical wants you to post a comment in the said call for testing thread and mention the CPU model you're using, if you used either the Wayland or Xorg session, and either MPV or Totem apps, and the output of the "vainfo" command.
Canonical has identified a few issues from the first reports, including corrupt video playback in Xorg sessions, screensaver kicking in during MPV playback in Wayland sessions, broken titlebars, black screen with Totem, and stuttering on an AMD system with a Radeon GPU. The company promises fixes for all these issues in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Meanwhile, you can test the video playback yourself and give Canonical the feedback it needs to improve hardware-accelerate video playback on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which will be a long-term supported release. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is hitting the streets this spring on April 26, with many other new features and improvements.