Full Screen Video on the E2 and Why I Love LXDE

Aleutia E2 Playing FullScreen Video of Scary Robot Dog

YouTube is one of today’s killer apps, and has been a key weakness of the E2, whose 500MHz Via CPU and onboard graphics chip struggled to play streaming videos at more than a frame or two per second, i.e. unusable. But we’ve just installed LXDE, a great “lightweight” windows manager that is much snappier and speeds YouTube up to “just kind of jerky”.

Before today, downloaded divx files on the E2 running on Gnome would open and be extremely jerky and unusable, even at quarter screen. However, by installing LXDE (just 20MB) by following their instructions for Ubuntu, adding the Medibuntu repositories and w32codecs (to play Window Media files, and not have to worry about drivers), and using the fantastic MPlayer (we’ve fully removed Totem and aren’t using VLC anymore), smooth full-screen video is possible without even frames dropping.

In the above video, I’m playing a downloaded .wmv file from Boston Dynamics, the company behind the amazing (and kind of terrifying) autonomous robot Big Dog.