Nvidia released on 24th, of February their new Nvidia driver for Linux. The version 180.35 is a real surprise, since it is said to support now all Nvidia gfx cards starting with the 8 series regarding the VC-1 and WMV playback. The release note states also a few major fixes are fixed regarding malicious and/or interlaced mpeg streams. Also the performance on slow hardware should be better and a few other glitches should have been fixed also.
Unfortunately now word was wasted about memory allocation/consumption which still an issue with certain constellations (compiz/KDE/OpenGL).
But all in all it’s again very impressive to see Nvidia performing at such a speed in releasing their video driver for Linux. The distance to their competitors (ATI/Intel) seems to be bigger than ever.
Already today one can set up a low-budget HTPC system which can fully handle HD content, and this without having paid a single cent for software of any kind (OS).

Again it’s only a matter of a few days when the new driver will be available in this experimental repository for either Jaunty or in this case here, Intrepid Ibex

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main