Arch Linux

jfca283

Member

From: Santiago, Chile

Registered: 2007-10-09

Posts: 177

nvidia and pure video?

is the driver with acceleration hardware, pure video, on the packages in pacman?
or is only in AUR?

Lord Illidan

Member

From: Malta

Registered: 2007-10-25

Posts: 248

Re: nvidia and pure video?

is the driver with acceleration hardware, pure video, on the packages in pacman?
or is only in AUR?

Pure Video? You mean 3D capable? If so, then it's available in pacman.

EDIT : Ignore this post, didn't know what you meant.

Last edited by Lord Illidan (2009-01-02 23:34:09)

jfca283

Member

From: Santiago, Chile

Registered: 2007-10-09

Posts: 177

Re: nvidia and pure video?

i mean acceleration hardware for watching h264 movies
the driver support that option in pacman o is it in AUR only?

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: nvidia and pure video?

the driver is beta and is availabe only in AUR.

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Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: nvidia and pure video?

You need any of the 180.xx series of drivers from AUR. As someone else has already said, these drivers are not final and may not be stable. But, then again, is any nvidia driver release really stable?

jfca283

Member

From: Santiago, Chile

Registered: 2007-10-09

Posts: 177

Re: nvidia and pure video?

mmm
i'll have to wait for the official driver
when you think it will be available?
i'm trying to make a HTPC, but for watch x264 videos i need hardware acceleration

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: nvidia and pure video?

mmm
'm trying to make a HTPC, but for watch x264 videos i need hardware acceleration

you need also a player that supports vdpau.

---

Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: nvidia and pure video?

You need any of the 180.xx series of drivers from AUR. As someone else has already said, these drivers are not final and may not be stable.

you need also a player that supports vdpau.

Exactly. And, until the patches build cleanly against FFmpeg from subversion, things may remain unstable. There is work being done there.

There's another possibility coming down the wire. x264's devs added a bunch of their code to FFmpeg's H264 decoder. It's all assembly stuff that's blazing fast. On top of that, FFmpeg's multi-threaded decoding capabilities are being worked on. When that's in place, H264 software decoding using FFmpeg (Mplayer, VLC, Xine, ETC) will be faster than CoreAVC.

jfca283

Member

From: Santiago, Chile

Registered: 2007-10-09

Posts: 177

Re: nvidia and pure video?

cool...i only have to wait

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: nvidia and pure video?

The VDPAU patch for FFmpeg is in "round 5". I'm guessing that it'll be enabled fairly soon.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: nvidia and pure video?

Bump to update:

~ > ffmpeg -formats | grep -i vdpau
... snip ...
built on Jan  6 2009 14:39:00, gcc: 4.3.2
D V D  h264_vdpau      H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (VDPAU acceleration)

There isn't an output driver in this build, but FFmpeg from subversion apparently can decode both raw and encoded H264 streams using VDPAU. The MPEG1/2 code is being factored now, and should be released fairly quickly. How soon the output drivers get into Mplayer's subversion tree is a mystery to me. It didn't happen as of the time that I wrote this post.

On top of VDPAU stuff, improvements in FFmpeg's software decoding of H264 are showing about a 40% CPU drop from where it was a couple of days ago on this computer. This is with playback in Mplayer from subversion. I expect the CPU usage to keep dropping as more code gets ported from x264.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: nvidia and pure video?

One more bump.

The following 1920x1200 screenshot is of ffplay playing a local sample from Apple. It's a 1080p H264 stream with AAC audio. I believe that this is using the xvmc driver. The CPU usage spikes sometimes up to 60% spread over two cores, but also drops far below what htop is reporting. This is average as far as I can tell. More details are in the terminals: