Ubuntu: Playing 1080i HD content with Nvidia hardware acceleration decoding

Playing HD content on Linux has not always been that easy to achieve. Firstly, you ideally need a supported graphics card and from my research it seems preferable to go with Nvidia over AMD/ATI for Linux supported drivers at the time of writing. Secondly, you will need to configure your system to make the best use of the hardware based decoder on the current generation of graphics cards. Here's how I configured Ubuntu 11.10, an Nvidia G210 / N210 and VLC to playback 720p and 1080i HD content on a lowly Intel Atom based system...

Fix no sound in Adobe Flash on Linux under Firefox, Chromium, Opera et al.

After moving to Ubuntu 11.10 I have been experiencing issues with Adobe Flash not playing sound at all through any brower on this PulseAudio equipped operating system. PulseAudio is a sound server which accepts sound input from one or more sources and redirects it to one or more sinks (E.g. sound cards). One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it; common issues include programs locking the ALSA sound device which then prevents other applications from mixing and using the audio device. To correct the issue I experienced with Opera and Flash I followed the following method which routes ALSA apps directly through pulse:

Ubuntu: auto mount samba network shares on boot via smbfs & fstab

Increasingly all of my data is stored on a network server which allows me to access it from multiple devices/platforms and to reduce local storage for each device. Having migrated recently from Windows XP to Ubuntu 11.10 for my main desktop workstation I want to automatically mount my network based data currently hosted as a Windows share on a samba server when my Ubuntu system boots up. Here's how...