Starting with Mesa-9.1, there has been some support for nouveau to do hardware-accelerated video decoding using xvmc and vdpau. In mesa-9.1, the vdpau component needs firmware for the newer cards (VP4.2+), and starting with mesa-9.2, there is additional xvmc support for some cards (VP2) that also need firmware to work. I was thinking something like the following in pkg_postinst: if use video_cards_nouveau && ( use vdpau || use xvmc ); then elog "Note that you may need to install firmware to make use of" elog "nouveau's hardware video acceleration functionality." elog "See http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/" elog "for more details." fi Note that there's also bug 480832 to add an ebuild that would procure this firmware, but I'm not holding out much hope for that going through. This seems much less controversial.
sys-firmware/nvidia-firmware has been added to the tree so the new text could be: if use video_cards_nouveau && ( use vdpau || use xvmc ); then elog "Note that you may need to install sys-firmware/nvidia-firmware to make use of" elog "nouveau's hardware video acceleration functionality." elog "See http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/" elog "for more details." fi @X11: Any objections?