[SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

j33205 · 2015-07-22 03:21:09

Hello. First, I have Arch64 running Xorg installed with what I believe was the NVIDIA propietary driver (some form of nvidia-340xx since I have a GEForce 9500 GT) as well as a pure Openbox setup on top of that. My rig is considerably older and all of my performance capping is a result of my AMD Sempron 3600+. I would like to be able watch higher quality videos on my system (of the 720p variety specifically). Now just a note, MPC-HC on my dual-booted Win7 runs such videos fine and VLC doesn't. VLC in Arch also does not accomplish what I want. In an attempt to avoid VLC I have MPlayer (with SMPlayer frontend). When I try to play a 720p video out of the box it plays in the small windowed screen fine but when I fullscreen it, the video lags super hard behind the audio. I took a look at the Preferences and change the output driver from X11(slow) to Default. This allows me to render the video fast enough but at only a fixed video image size for some reason, so my fullscreened video only takes up a portion of my actual screen. I've tried some of the other listed drivers and all result in the same thing, audio and no video and usually a whole player crash. Did some research and found that I should be able to use vdpau or xv (not sure which one or what the difference is) but they also result in crashes. The Nvidia GPU driver and Xorg install I did baffled me to no end (and Xorg won't let me configure it [another later post perhaps] but it seems to work well enough), and I have a small feeling this might have something to do with my problem, but I really have no idea.

Any suggestions for getting my system to play 720p videos, in SMPlayer or otherwise?

Last edited by j33205 (2015-07-27 23:47:39)

Svenstaro · 2015-07-22 03:59:52

Did you try mpv?

JohnWinkerbelt · 2015-07-22 07:55:14

I assume you already have vdpau one way or another installed. If not, look at this wiki about VDPAU.

Then I know VLC won't activate this per default, you have to activate it in the options by hand.
About mplayer, try to follow this wiki about mplayer and vdpau.

# ~/.mplayer/config
vo=vdpau,
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffodivxvdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,

Or like Svenstaro said, did you try mpv with hardware decoding?

# ~/.mpv/config
hwdec=vdpau

MPV automatically chooses the best decoder for watching movies, because if uses vdpau fails, it'll fall back to software rendering. Mplayer would crash, if the movie is encoded not suited for vdpau (i.e. hi10 colour space).

To verify your gpu load, start nvidia-settings and open up the "Graphics Card Information" (Usually at GPU 0 - ***). There you can see the GPU Utilization AND Video Engine Utilization. Here you will easily see, if the decoder is "only" hardware accelerated, has even video decoding or is stuck at software rendering, while playing a video.

Hope that helps, at least to eliminate not working cases

Last edited by JohnWinkerbelt (2015-07-22 15:43:04)

j33205 · 2015-07-25 00:03:16

Ok, now I'm having problems installing VDPAU. As per the wiki since I'm using the proprietary Nvidia drivers so I made sure nvidia-340xx-utils was installed and it is. And to check the features before going any further I installed and tried 'vdpauinfo' which returns me errors:

display: :0 screen: 0
modprobe: FATAL: Module nvidia not found.
Error creating VDPAU device: 1

And naturally when I check 'printenv' I have no VDPAU_DRIVER environment variable. And

grep -i vdpau ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log

returns me nothing. What's going on?

EDIT:
So I checked 'lspci -k' and I get:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1)
Subsystem: XFX Pine Group Inc. Device 400a
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nouveau

so Nouveau is being used, but I have no idea why (I thought Nvidia was supposed to blacklist Nouveau on its own) and I would like to change that to the prop. drivers.

Last edited by j33205 (2015-07-25 00:07:28)

JohnWinkerbelt · 2015-07-25 19:23:13

Did you also installed the nvidia-340xx package? Because the "modprobe: FATAL: Module nvidia not found." error already tells that you may have the utils installed, but not the driver itself. And yes, in Arch, it is apparently possible to install the tools without the nvidia driver. This happened to me too.

3. Install the appropriate driver for your card:
For GeForce 8000/9000 and 100-300 series cards [NV5x, NV8x, NV9x and NVAx] from around 2006-2010, install the nvidia-340xx or nvidia-340xx-lts package along with nvidia-340xx-libgl.

4. Reboot. The nvidia package contains a file which blacklists the nouveau module, so rebooting is necessary.

For more information I suggest you to look at this page about installing NVIDIA.

Good luck

Last edited by JohnWinkerbelt (2015-07-25 19:59:20)

j33205 · 2015-07-26 06:06:01

That is weird. I installed the actual nvidia-340xx driver, can't believe I managed to not really have it after like half a dozen attempts of reinstalling and trying to make sense of this driver thing. Everything seems to be working now. SMPlayer appears to render videos just fine now with Default setting, vdpau, xv, and even under X11. On a side note, VLC also functions almost as well under a manual video output change to vdpau.

One thing I'm still hung up on is configuring VDPAU. 'grep -i vdpau ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log' still gives no output and I still don't appear to have a VDPAU_DRIVER env var according to 'printenv'. Should this be necessary, or should I not worry about?

Thank you very much John, I'm very glad I got this working (especially the driver stuff I haven't been sure about since the beginning). And if I don't need to "configure" vdpau then I can go ahead and mark this thread [SOLVED].

Last edited by j33205 (2015-07-26 06:12:22)

JohnWinkerbelt · 2015-07-27 11:52:31

I'm glad it worked out

If you want to confirm the use of vdpau, you won't have luck with ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log/. VDPAU will only be used, if you actively starting a video with certain programs, which can make use of vdpau. If you don't use vdpau in your session, you won't see any logs about it. In short, don't worry.

Like in my first post mentioned, you have only to install vdpau and configure the programs, which can use vdpau. You don't have to configure vdpau itself. To confirm its use in certain programs, just start a player in terminal to see the outputs.

$ mplayer video_01.mp4
...
VO: [vdpau] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 Planar YV12 
[vdpau] Got display refresh rate 60.223 Hz.
...

or

$ mpv video_02.mp4
...
Using hardware decoding.
VO: [opengl] 1920x1080 vdpau
...

Last edited by JohnWinkerbelt (2015-07-27 11:55:51)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-07-22 03:21:09

[SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#2 2015-07-22 03:59:52

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#3 2015-07-22 07:55:14

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#4 2015-07-25 00:03:16

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#5 2015-07-25 19:23:13

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#6 2015-07-26 06:06:01

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

#7 2015-07-27 11:52:31

Re: [SOLVED] Enabling MPlayer vdpau / xv

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