While there is nothing wrong with the open source Nvidia video drivers, they simply don’t have some of the functions that HTPC users need, namely VDPAU. Although I’ve heard that early installation of the Nvidia proprietary drivers was difficult, it is now fairly straight forward. The following site contains every available version of the Nvidia proprietary drivers:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/
After downloading the appropriate version, make it executable with chmod, then run it with sudo. One error that frequently occurs is: “ERROR: Unable to find the kernel source tree for currently running kernel.” First, make sure that you have your kernel source installed. But, if you do have your kernel source installed, it may just be an issue of pointing the Nvidia driver in the right direciton.
The Nvidia driver looks for your kernel source in /usr/src/linux. However, many distributions, store the kernel source in a directory named after the specific version of the kernel, e.g.,/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.28-13. As such, you can fix the error by simply creating a softlink to the specific version of the kernel that you are running by executing the following command within the /usr/src directory: ln -s /usr/src/linux-&(uname -r)/ linux