VDPAU: Nvidia 180.41 released

Posted on by acme

Nvidia released on 20th of March his new VDPAU capable driver for Linux. Here’s the related part from their changelog, regarding VDPAU:

  • Fixed corruption decoding H.264 clips with pictures where pic_order_cnt_type implies log2_max_pic_order_cnt_lsb_minus4 is not used, on G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, GT200 GPUs.
  • Update vdpau.h to document exact requirements for VdpDecoderRender bitstream data content.
  • Fix VDPAU error handling in some unusual low memory situations.
  • Fix hang in VDPAU in some cases of output mode timing changes.

    I’m running version 180.37 on a window-manager-less system, and hadn’t any problems with any type of content anymore.
    The next thing I could test is, running VDPAU with an composite manager, like Compiz, KWin or metacity.

    Unfortunately the experimental repository from Anders Kaseorg is still at version 180.29. I’ve installed yesterday Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) and saw, that version 180.37 have been installed. I was quite happy to see this pretty up-to-date version, but it didn’t work out of the box. The Nvidia module (driver) wasn’t properly installed, in a way a

    modprobe nvidia

    gave me a

    FATAL: Module nvidia not found.

    All in all it’s a bit confusing at the moment to keep track with all the different version, and the split into a new beta branch 185.xx didn’t really help a lot.

    4 thoughts on “VDPAU: Nvidia 180.41 released”

    1. Just a little message to say thank you !
      Your diligence in keeping track of updates of the new drivers and other stuff related to HD playback under linux really is appreciated.
      Keep up the good work !

    2. Hi,
      I just wanted to know what’s current state of VDPAU. Initially it pretty much failed on everything apart from the samples that where mentioned in patches for mplayer.
      Is it now working on common mp4 and mkv, like the trailers from apple website?

    3. @Anurag
      VDPAU is supposed to accelerate MPEG2, VC1 and MPEG4/AVC aka H.264 (e.g. Matroska (.mkv) or AVCHD (.mts, .m2ts) and not MPEG4/ASP aka DivX/mpeg4.
      These mentioned formats are working here very good. The codec is not experimental anymore and is ready to be used.

    4. AFAIK mp4 can also contain H.264 as video stream.
      Initially there was little support for mkv/mp4 and other containers.
      But thanks for the information. I think I should switch back to linux again.

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