According to Will Cooke, the team’s goal right now is to lay the groundwork for a solution that would enable hardware-accelerated playback of video files by default, with a focus on making it work on Intel graphics cards. Suppor for Nvidia and AMD Radeon GPUs should come at a later time thanks to Canonical’s new testing infrastructure. The Intel SDKß (Software Development Kit) issue with the LibVA library should soon be resolved as Intel is currently working on a fix. In the meantime, if you’re interested in following the work that’s being done on enabling hardware-accelerated video playback on Intel CPUs in Ubuntu Linux, you should take a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelQuickSyncVideo.