The end of the world must be near: nVidia released a new version of their GNU/Linux driver that fixes some of the annoyances regarding RENDER performance. Given you apply some manual adjustments to the configuration the new driver performs in a somewhat usable manner.
It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.
If you’re using a GeForce 8×00 graphics card and the binary blob from nVidia you’ll may notice that the picture on your TV is slightly larger than the area the TV can display; a part of your desktop will be invisible.
That is pretty annoying, especially when watching movies with subtitles and half of the subtitle is unreadable just because of that.
Now, the following is a little something that works fine at least for Mplayer…
Mplayer provides the command line switches -screenh and -screenw which you can use to rescale the movie on the TV a little bit. For me, the following command line works out pretty fine:
mplayer -screenh 725 filename.mkv
Give it a try, play with the values and let’s hope nVidia will fix this nasty issue one day…