VDPAU: Nvidia 180.29 and new mplayer released

Posted on by acme

On 9th respectively 10th of January 2009 Nvidia published their new VDPAU driver in version 180.29 for x86 and x86_64 and a new mplayer-vdpau version.
Here are the interesting fixes from VDPAU’s point of view:

  • Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to display a green screen when using the overlay-based presentation queue with interlaced modes.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented VDPAU from working correctly after X server restarts on some GPUs.
  • Improved VDPAU’s handling of mode switches; eliminated a crash in its mode switch recovery code and a hang in the blit-based presentation queue.
  • Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to crash when using DisplayPort devices.
  • Fixed a potential hang in VDPAU when using the blit-based presentation queue on systems with multiple GPUs not in SLI mode.
  • Implemented missing error checking of layer data in VDPAU’s VdpVideoMixerRender function.
  • Improved VDPAU’s handling of setups with multiple GPUs, if a subset of the GPUs cannot be supported due to resource limitations.
  • Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and VDPAU.
  • Fix potential hang in VDPAU when the overlay is already in use.
  • Fixed a problem in VDPAU that prevented the overlay-based presentation queue from being used on displays connected by component video.
  • Fixed various problems in VDPAU that caused visual corruption when decoding certain MPEG-2 video streams.
  • Fixed a crash in VDPAU caused by certain invalid MPEG-2 streams, in 64-bit drivers for some GPUs.

      • The new mplayer-vdapu is available in version in version 3482714. This version claims not to need the line 704 (+11) patch/hack in libvo/vo_vdpau.c anymore.
      People reported, that NUM_VIDEO_SURFACES_H264 needs still to be set from 17 to 18 in some cases.
      And the notorious “error 23”, where VDPAU is running out of memory seems really be a matter of insufficient graphics card memory. Disabling composite ( nvidia-xconfig --no-composite ) seems to be utterly recommanded, not only because of tearing.
      You’d better buy a GFX card with at least 512MB, and if you like to play back VC-1, it should be a 8400GT with 512 MB RAM.

      Anders Kaseorg’s binary drivers [1] for Ubuntu aren’t published at this very moment, but it’s a matter of hours I think.

      Use these entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list

      deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

      Replace jaunty with intrepid, if needed. And look up the version with

      aptitude update
aptitude show nvidia-glx-180

7 thoughts on “VDPAU: Nvidia 180.29 and new mplayer released”

  2. @Anders Rune Jensen
    Yeah, me too, but damn, the binary driver isn’t available yet, and I won’t mess around with Nvidia’s installer again on my productive machine in the living room.

    Boy, this is whole stuff is freaking tense!

  3. So I turned off Composite explicitly and the tearing was reduced dramatically! I can’t see it unless I get very close to the screen and look. I also discovered why on this Fourm Post

  6. thank you for this
    the bug is still present in ubuntu, but only in mplayer’s vdpau output. other renderers or players like vlc are just fine, but vdpau offers better performance
    i had tearing on both laptop display and tv with hdmi
    checking both sync to vblank boxex in nvidia config and using sudo nvidia-xconfig –no-composite did the trick after the restart
    no more annoying screen tears
    :beer:

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