VDPAU – The NVIDIA 180.06 beta driver for Linux – or how to play back AVCHD with GPU acceleration

Posted on by acme
Installing the new nvidia driver (180.06)

  1. Download the driver

    wget http://de.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.06/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.06-pkg2.run

  2. Meet some dependencies:

    apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

    apt-get install libtheora-dev libxv-dev

  3. Save your current (working) xorg.conf file

    cd /etc/X11
    sudo cp xorg.org xorg.conf.working

  4. Remove the nvidia driver (This is Ubuntu specific, don’t try this with other distos)

    apt-get remove nvidia-glx-177 --purge

  5. Now make sure, the modules will come back after an update run. Therefor edit the file /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common, and add

    DISABLED_MODULES=nv nvidia_new

  6. Now leave your graphical Desktop (KDE/Gnome) by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 and kill kdm or for gnome gdm.

    sudo killall -9 kdm

  7. Go to the downloaded nvidia driver and install it. Make it executable first, if you like

    chmod 755 ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.06-pkg2.run
    ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.06-pkg2.run

  8. Reboot

    shutdown -r 0

Building the mplayer-vdpau

Now you have to download and compile the mplayer itself.

  1. Download and unpack it

    wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/mplayer-vdpau-3076399.tar.bz2
    tar xfvj mplayer-vdpau-3076399.tar.bz2

  2. run the make script

    cd mplayer-vdpau-3076399
    ./checkout-patch-build.sh

    If you like, edit the checkout-patch-build.sh script, and add a “-j4” to the “make” line, if you’ve got a multicore CPU, and don’t like to wait ages.

  3. copy the codecs.conf file into your mplayer directory (save/move away your old one, if you need it)

    cp etc/codecs.conf ~/.mplayer/

I’ve personally got a error:

libx264.c:165: error: 'x264_param_t' has no member named 'b_bframe_adaptive'

I didn’t intend to use x264 for encoding with mencoder, so I’ve just turned off this encoder:

./configure --disable-x264
make -j4

Read here, how to fix this error: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1845803&postcount=43

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15 thoughts on “VDPAU – The NVIDIA 180.06 beta driver for Linux – or how to play back AVCHD with GPU acceleration”

  1. “I’ve been waiting for this moment a very long time”

    I’ve been waiting for your review of this ever since nvidia announced it 🙂

    I havn’t found the list of supported GPU’s before, but just as I suspected it doesn’t look like my onboard nvidia 6400 (I think) is supported. Would be great to find out which onboard cards uses the least amount of power. At least one that can power down the GPU when it is not being used 🙂 I guess would probably would have to go for one of those 9×00 cards to get VC-1 support?

  3. @Anders Rune Jensen
    Hi Anders 🙂
    My card is a 8500GT, it’s a quite cheap model, and is being cooled passively. It’s not onboard. In the living-room I’m facing the same situation like you, since there’s an onboard 7025, which wouldn’t work.

  4. I just searched the local hardware dealer and indeed the Geforce 9400 cards are really cheap (~50 euro) and passively cooled, sadly its pci express. It seems like one of the biggest problems except for the stability is the tearing issue. How bad is it? Is it bad enough to make it completely unusable?

  5. @Anders Rune Jensen
    The whole thing is very very unasable. It’s realy only a feasibility test, nothing else. Tearing is one of many very evil bugs (System freezes and other)
    NVIDIA just wanted to piss into Intel’s and ATI’s garden.
    It’s really not worth to buy any GFX card righ now, only because of the release of 180.06. I thing we’ve got plenty of time.

    Btw: how did you do this thing with your avatar picture?

  8. Pingback: NVIDIA VDPAU 180.11 test against .mts (AVCHD) and .mkv (Matroska/h264) playback - Acmelabs’ Blog
  9. Pingback: NVIDIA’s VDPAU version 180.11 hardware acceleration for HD content (H.264) with major improvements. - Acmelabs’ Blog
  10. Pingback: xine-vdpau - the first contact | Acmelabs' Blog
  13. Pingback: VDPAU bug report

  14. really good, but it would have saved me some work if you put the suported list in the begining. damm nvidia¬¬

  15. @nande
    Hold it! This is very much outdated. All Nvidia cards beginning with 8xxx suppose to work now.
    Please consider the posting date, and please look here at this Blog for a recent VDPAU article.
    The current nvidia drivers do support VDPAU out of the box, and a recent mplayer checkout doesn’t need special treatment anymore.

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