VDPAU – The NVIDIA 180.06 beta driver for Linux – or how to play back AVCHD with GPU acceleration
Conclusion:
Impressive, but none of my Matroska (.mkv) worked yet!
The picture below shows my CPU load while an AVCHD samples have been played back, but there is too much squares and all other kind of trash in the AVCHD video stream every few seconds. It’s actually not usable, but it shows dramatically what hardware acceleration can do for CPU load. Really Impressive. The video is tearing, seems the v-sync (SYNC_TO_VBLANK) is completely ignored. If a mplayer session crashed, the console you’re working in, is unusable afterwards.I’m really looking forward to the next release. It’s just great having a working hardware acceleration. And this before ATI’s XvBA and Intel’s hardware accelerating open source driver. Having yet another video output driver is also a thing one have to like. But you can always list all possible video output options if you forgot one
mplayer -vo help
My top command gave me this, while I was playing back an AVCHD file:
top - 21:47:16 up 1:06, 1 user, load average: 0.29, 0.23, 0.18 Tasks: 195 total, 1 running, 190 sleeping, 0 stopped, 4 zombie Cpu0 : 0.3%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 3.8%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 1.3%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 2.9%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 4055052k total, 1932692k used, 2122360k free, 207964k buffers Swap: 4988172k total, 0k used, 4988172k free, 1051068k cachedPID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 10339 acme 20 0 252m 31m 16m S 5 0.8 0:18.26 konsole 10858 acme 20 0 172m 31m 16m S 3 0.8 0:03.20 mplayer 10009 root 20 0 197m 31m 11m S 2 0.8 0:20.18 Xorg 10346 acme 20 0 449m 52m 28m S 1 1.3 0:05.83 firefox 7220 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:02.82 cifsd
The funny thing was, that in spite of being almost idle, and the CPU was ticking at 1600MHz instead of 2400MHz, the mplayer output says me:
Error while decoding frame!
[h264_vdpau @ 0xbf2660]B picture before any references, skipping 0
[h264_vdpau @ 0xbf2660]decode_slice_header error
[h264_vdpau @ 0xbf2660]no frame!
Error while decoding frame!
A: 58.0 V: 56.6 A-V: 1.339 ct: 0.019 2803/2803 1% 0% 2.4% 50 0************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************
Thanks for your attention! Please report bugs, typos, errors or own experiences.
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The times for CoreCodec in their CoreAVC is getting harder, and Microsoft’s Windows has no monopole with its DXVA anymore!
External Links:
NVIDIA: http://www.nvidia.de/object/linux_display_amd64_180.06_de.html
HOWTO NVIDIA: http://tuxicity.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/howto-install-nvidia-manually-in-ubuntu-and-debian/
heise.de: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Linux-API-fuer-die-HD-Video-Faehigkeiten-von-GeForce-GPUs–/meldung/118940
and
“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?
What graphics card did you use for testing? Maybe I skimmed to quickly but couldn’t find it
@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.
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?
@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?
I used http://www.gravatar.com/. It’s used a lot of places now. I was wondering what wordpress plugin you where using to get this?
@Anders Rune Jensen
Actually I’m using WP out of the box. Must be a built in feature then
[...] first beta driver, the 180.06 on the 14th of November. I’ve tested these new Beta driver here, and found a few bugs. I skipped the test of the driver 180.08 published 4 days later, but tested [...]
[...] the intructions here if you like to install NVIDIA’s Beta driver on a Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid [...]
[...] used this Nvidia vdpau driver. Version >=180.16 is the minimum version you need. Read here how to install this new Beta driver on a Unbuntu [...]
I had to do more to get the driver uninstalled, if you get an error after installation in dmesg about an API mismatch look here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125147&page=2
@Kyle Brandt
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
[...] None of the tests listed here play properly: http://blog.mymediasystem.net/avchd/…cceleration/3/ [...]
really good, but it would have saved me some work if you put the suported list in the begining. damm nvidia¬¬
@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.