There are two major highlights about the two last released Nvidia VDPAU drivers. The first one is, that the stable driver 180.44 fixed an ugly bug in the x86_64 branch, concerning the VC-1 playback. And the second even better news is, that the ugly resource problem seems to be fixed in the 185.19 beta driver. Even systems with on-board graphics adapters (shared graphics memory) seem to work now without any issues anymore.

Here are the the release news from the VDPAU point of view:
Nvidia VDPAU 180.44 (x86, x86-64)

• Updated VDPAU to support VC-1/WMV acceleration on all GPUs supported by VDPAU; see the README for details.
• Fixed VDPAU corruption on some H.264 clips.
• Updated VDPAU documentation in the README and in vdpau.h, in particular regarding how to use the deinterlacing algorithms in the VdpVideoMixer object. Explicitly documented “half rate” deinterlacing, which should allow the advanced algorithms to run on more low-end systems.
• Implemented a “skip chroma deinterlace” option in VDPAU, which should allow the advanced deinterlacing algorithms to run on more low-end systems. See vdpau.h.
• Fixed VDPAU VC-1 decoding on 64-bit platforms.
• Updated the VDPAU wrapper library to print dlerror() messages when driver loading problems occur.
• Improved VDPAU’s handling of some corrupt H.264 streams, and some corrupt/invalid MPEG streams on some GPUs.
• Fixed VDPAU to correctly handle WMV “range reduction” on some GPUs. A minor backwards-compatible API change was made for this; see vdpau.h’s documentation for structure field VdpPictureInfoVC1.rangered.
• Fixed a problem that caused surfaces to be marked as visible too early when the blit presentation queue is in use.
• Fixed VDPAU to prevent some cases of “display preemption” in the face of missing H.264 reference frames on some GPUs.

And here’s the changelog from the beta-branch: 185.19 (x86, x86-64)

• Fix VDPAU to eliminate some cases of GPU hangs when decoding H.264 video on G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, or GT200 GPUs, and supplying a DPB missing some reference frames.
• The VDPAU presentation queue now syncs to VBLANK in the blit path. The environment variable VDPAU_NVIDIA_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE selects which display to sync to when TwinView is enabled; see the README for details.
• On systems using integrated graphics, VDPAU now uses system RAM instead of video RAM for many purposes. This should prevent “out of resources” problems in most cases, even when the video RAM carve-out is configured as low as 128M.

Unfortunately the stable driver from the PPA repsository is still 180.29 for both Ubuntu versions, Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) and for Intrepid Ibex (8.10).
So for Ubuntu users there is no ‘clean’ way available at the moment to install the new drivers, beside installing them the Nvidia way.
As far as I see, the PPA repository seems only to goes along with the Jaunty Jackalope stable driver. So we probably only see a new version there, if the Jaunty is updated also.
Anyway, I’m really glad to see, that H.264 and AVCHD playback is fully accelerated for Linux meanwhile and the guys from Nvidia are working hard to get it as good as possible – and since the mplayer team has already integrated the VDPAU support into their media player,

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

one can say Linux is really fit for 1080p. Well – HD authoring for Linux plays still an orphan role. This may be the next big thing.