Zonbu MPEG2 & MPEG4 Playback now excellent

Earlier releases of the Zonbu OS had issues with the playback of MPEG2 files as I noted here on August 4th.

With the latest software release, 5.803, this issue appears to be resolved.

MPEG2 files now appear to be playing with full hardware acceleration.

What this means is that the complex decoding of the MPEG2 stream is offloaded from the main processor, to a dedicated MPEG2 decoding subsystem. This is important as decoding video is an intense task and the Zonbu has a relatively modest processor…

5.803: Recompiled kernel, still no encryption acceleration

I thought I’d take a quick look under the hood and see if the latest release has a newer kernel.

While the kernel version itself has not changed, it has been recompiled.

There are no optimizations formally noted on the release page, but we can always hope some technical changes and improvements have been made to optimize the kernel for the Via C7 chipset.

The kernel now reports: