Arch Linux

dbourgeo

Member

Registered: 2012-11-26

Posts: 30

vlc 2.2.8-3 no video during playback using Nouveau and VDPAU

I can get hardware acceleration to work on an older nvidia card GeForce GT 630 using nouveau, mesa-vdpau, and nouveau-fw (the wiki says to get this outdated firmware package from the AUR?).

vdpauinfo and mpv --hwdec=vdpau video.mp4 are OK.

Using https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=223324 I tried to solve this problem.

The proposed semi-solution by setting the environment variable VDPAU_DRIVER=vdpau only just turns off decoding. It could just as well be VDPAU_DRIVER=xxxxx. vlc complains on STDOUT about not being able to find the library (which should be nouveau). But of course, nouveau doesn't seem to work.

It seems VDPAU is a recent thing for vlc (?), so based on the conversation in https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210624
I installed the libva-vdpau-driver. I then opened vlc and went to Tools->Preferences->Video and changed the output to "X11 video output (XCB)".  Under Tools->Preferences->Input/Codecs I changed Hardware-accelerated decoding to "VA-API video decoder via X11".

The command line output, instead of being a bunch of errors related to vdpau_display and a catch-all error for output surface creation becomes:

VLC media player 2.2.8 Weatherwax (revision 2.2.7-14-g3cc1d8cba9)
[0000564cf4073398] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
libva info: VA-API version 1.0.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nouveau_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_0
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
[00007faec9466eb8] avcodec decoder: Using mesa gallium vaapi for hardware decoding.

I can scroll through a video more quickly now, but as was pointed out, with vdpau acceleration you get stuttering, pixelation and other artifacts, and sometimes vlc seems to choke and take a split second or more to get going again. It seems OK enough if you just let it play.

So, its not much of a solution, at least on my machine. You can also try different video outputs, though I found OpenGL GLX video output causes crashes and my screen locks up.

Edit: actually mplayer and mpv both misbehave with stuttering and occasional pixelation when I force them into vdpau mode, I just never looked at the video long enough to notice! So, it is probably nothing to do with any player, though vlc is still worse.

Last edited by dbourgeo (2018-01-23 21:46:33)