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odin89

Member

Registered: 2011-09-23

Posts: 33

4K HEVC playback with ati card

Hi guys,

i bought an Nvidia GTX 950 some time ago to play HEVC 10-bit videos with Linux. Well i have this card a few month now and its still not possible with linux. At least not with kodi as player. Now i read that ati now support 10-bit HEVC with VDPAU. But do i need the latest amdgpu-pro driver (which is not available for arch) or is it working with the normal amdgpu driver? I´m interested in the ATI RX 460. This time i want to ask before i buy another GPU and waste more money for a card that wont help me.
Would be nice if someone have an answer for me

greetings

odin89

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

Not sure where you've read that, but VDPAU does not support 10-bit. Not anywhere. It's through and through 8-bit. It'll need additional work for 10-bit. Which may not happen, the VDPAU guy at Nvidia is no longer the VDPAU guy at Nvidia, so it looks a lot like VDPAU is dead.

That said, Nvidia does actually support 10-bit now, with cuda/nvcuvid. It's not yet implemented, but there are patches for ffmpeg and mpv to enable it. Right now you'll get decoding of 10-bit video, but it'll be dithered down to 8-bit for presentation. Once the ffmpeg and mpv patches land, you'll get the full 10-bit. Kodi doesn't support cuda, so you're out of luck there.

odin89

Member

Registered: 2011-09-23

Posts: 33

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

First of all thanks for the fast answer. I read it Here. Dithering down would be ok (at the moment). What i dont know is if i need amdgpu-pro.

That cuda support this is nice an i´ll try it with qmplay2. I read that the player can use cuda. But i like my library in kodi and in the changelog for the next version is no word about cuda so i think it wont get implement soon

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

Interesting, that link indeed shows 10-bit support. If it really works, it's for sure dithered down, the presentation part of VDPAU only supports 8-bit surfaces.

About cuda, it was discussed just a few moments ago on the ffmpeg-devel IRC channel and indeed there aren't any immediate plans for it in Kodi. The main devs aren't very interested to add yet another decoder, but they would discuss patches if the ffmpeg dev who developed the mpv support would also attempt support in Kodi.

iuno

Member

Registered: 2014-08-09

Posts: 42

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

Same as on reddit, according to users in the phoronix forum, it should work:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/l … si-polaris

You won't have to use amdgpu-pro, the code for video stuff is free.
Install

mesa-vdpau

and you should be good to go.

Last edited by iuno (2016-11-27 23:22:54)

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

That Phoronix link made me check the ffmpeg code. If you look here, you'll see VDPAU support in the YUV420P case (that's 8-bit), but not in the YUV420P10 case (that's 10-bit). VAAPI is in the YUV420P10 case though. That makes me think VDPAU won't work for 10-bit video, but VAAPI will. In this case, the package is libva-mesa-driver and then you do simply "mpv --hwdec=vaapi"

Last edited by Gusar (2016-11-28 05:34:24)

odin89

Member

Registered: 2011-09-23

Posts: 33

Re: 4K HEVC playback with ati card

Okay thanks for the answers. I think i will buy an ati card and give it a try