Prepare installation media
Base installation of Linux Mint
- Follow the standard Linux Mint installation procedure - choose timezone, partitions, username, password etc.
- Disconnect the installation media and reboot.
- Login using previously selected username and password.
ATI Catalyst video driver
- fglrx is a proprietary ATI Catalyst video driver that provides XvBA (X-video Bitstream Acceleration) support.
- Install fglrx driver and other required utilities with the command below:
sudo apt-get install fglrx-updates xvba-va-driver vainfo
- Note: system reboot is required after the installation of the fglrx driver.
Kodi and VLC
- Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) and VLC are well known free and open-source multimedia players
- Both of them use HW accelerated video decoding and give excellent playback quality
- Both of them compatible with the most popular video formats
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install kodi vlc
- Kodi will support HW video acceleration out of the box
- In VLC you need to select Tools->Preferences->Input and Codecs->Hardware-accelerated decoding->Video Acceleration (VA) API