VDPAU: Nvidia 180.29 and new mplayer released
On 9th respectively 10th of January 2009 Nvidia published their new VDPAU driver in version 180.29 for x86 and x86_64 and a new mplayer-vdpau version.
Here are the interesting fixes from VDPAU’s point of view:
- Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to display a green screen when using the overlay-based presentation queue with interlaced modes.
- Fixed a bug that prevented VDPAU from working correctly after X server restarts on some GPUs.
- Improved VDPAU’s handling of mode switches; eliminated a crash in its mode switch recovery code and a hang in the blit-based presentation queue.
- Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to crash when using DisplayPort devices.
- Fixed a potential hang in VDPAU when using the blit-based presentation queue on systems with multiple GPUs not in SLI mode.
- Implemented missing error checking of layer data in VDPAU’s VdpVideoMixerRender function.
- Improved VDPAU’s handling of setups with multiple GPUs, if a subset of the GPUs cannot be supported due to resource limitations.
- Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and VDPAU.
- Fix potential hang in VDPAU when the overlay is already in use.
- Fixed a problem in VDPAU that prevented the overlay-based presentation queue from being used on displays connected by component video.
- Fixed various problems in VDPAU that caused visual corruption when decoding certain MPEG-2 video streams.
- Fixed a crash in VDPAU caused by certain invalid MPEG-2 streams, in 64-bit drivers for some GPUs.
The new mplayer-vdapu is available in version in version 3482714. This version claims not to need the line 704 (+11) patch/hack in libvo/vo_vdpau.c anymore.
People reported, that NUM_VIDEO_SURFACES_H264 needs still to be set from 17 to 18 in some cases.
And the notorious “error 23″, where VDPAU is running out of memory seems really be a matter of insufficient graphics card memory. Disabling composite ( nvidia-xconfig --no-composite ) seems to be utterly recommanded, not only because of tearing.
You’d better buy a GFX card with at least 512MB, and if you like to play back VC-1, it should be a 8400GT with 512 MB RAM.
Anders Kaseorg’s binary drivers [1] for Ubuntu aren’t published at this very moment, but it’s a matter of hours I think.
Use these entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Replace jaunty with intrepid, if needed. And look up the version with
aptitude update aptitude show nvidia-glx-180
Cool! Looking forward to testing these soon
@Anders Rune Jensen
Yeah, me too, but damn, the binary driver isn’t available yet, and I won’t mess around with Nvidia’s installer again on my productive machine in the living room.
Boy, this is whole stuff is freaking tense!
So I turned off Composite explicitly and the tearing was reduced dramatically! I can’t see it unless I get very close to the screen and look. I also discovered why on this Fourm Post
Any chance these package would work on Debian unstable?
@Alex
Seems like they don’t find a dkms package on debian… oh well