VDPAU – The NVIDIA 180.06 beta driver for Linux – or how to play back AVCHD with GPU acceleration

Posted on by acme

[UPDATE] Read here about the latest development of NVIDIA’s vdpau video output driver: Tag: vdpau
I’ve been waiting for this moment a very long time, and honestly speaking, I didn’t really believe I would play AVCHD content form my Canon HF100 with hardware acceleration on Linux in the next future.

But today I did. Yes!

This is going to be a little HOWTO about installing NVIDIA’s new Beta driver 180.06 on a Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

Please consider this is all real Beta stuff, and it’s really not suitable for usage in a productive environment. I had more glitches, than successfull playback attempts, and the developers of NVIDIA don’t claim it’s a bullet prove application, like you can read it in this document:

Known Limitations:
1. Playing some video streams may cause GPU errors and/or hang or
crash the system.
2. The skip forward/backward features are not robust yet and
can cause application or system hangs/crashes.
3. MPlayer OSD or Composite Picture is currently not supported.
4. Problems have been observed when building MPlayer with these
patches using gcc-4.3.2

Anyway – if you see it as a feasibility test, you won’t be disappointed 🙂


First of all we need to meet a few preparations. If you’re using TwinView and KWin with visual effect it’ll likely won’t work. Well – it didn’t work for me, unless I turned all this stuff off. That’s why my recommendation is to turn of visual effects, aka compositing in the xorg.conf and also things like Xinerama, Two “seperate X screen“. Deactivate compiz, and use KWin(KDE/4) and Metacity(Gnome) without any visual effects.

If you don’t turn it off, you’ll probably will see a green window and will have a crash of the player. The error will like look like one of these ones:

Error at libvo/vo_vdpau.c:637

or

Error at libvo/vo_vdpau.c:826

or something similar.

My scope is on KDE, and I don’t know right now where to turn off compiz and use Metacity in Gnome. KDE users, who are using compiz, because they don’t like KWin’s visual effects (slow, and boring 😉 ), can switch back to KWin by opening

    System -> System Settings -> Advanced -> Session Manager -> Window Manager

and Select there: KWin (KDE default)

The second step is to replace the installed nvidia-glx driver with the new one. Then we’re going to download all needed parts. After that we compile mplayer and start it.

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15 thoughts on “VDPAU – The NVIDIA 180.06 beta driver for Linux – or how to play back AVCHD with GPU acceleration”

  1. “I’ve been waiting for this moment a very long time”

    I’ve been waiting for your review of this ever since nvidia announced it 🙂

    I havn’t found the list of supported GPU’s before, but just as I suspected it doesn’t look like my onboard nvidia 6400 (I think) is supported. Would be great to find out which onboard cards uses the least amount of power. At least one that can power down the GPU when it is not being used 🙂 I guess would probably would have to go for one of those 9×00 cards to get VC-1 support?

  3. @Anders Rune Jensen
    Hi Anders 🙂
    My card is a 8500GT, it’s a quite cheap model, and is being cooled passively. It’s not onboard. In the living-room I’m facing the same situation like you, since there’s an onboard 7025, which wouldn’t work.

  4. I just searched the local hardware dealer and indeed the Geforce 9400 cards are really cheap (~50 euro) and passively cooled, sadly its pci express. It seems like one of the biggest problems except for the stability is the tearing issue. How bad is it? Is it bad enough to make it completely unusable?

  5. @Anders Rune Jensen
    The whole thing is very very unasable. It’s realy only a feasibility test, nothing else. Tearing is one of many very evil bugs (System freezes and other)
    NVIDIA just wanted to piss into Intel’s and ATI’s garden.
    It’s really not worth to buy any GFX card righ now, only because of the release of 180.06. I thing we’ve got plenty of time.

    Btw: how did you do this thing with your avatar picture?

  8. Pingback: NVIDIA VDPAU 180.11 test against .mts (AVCHD) and .mkv (Matroska/h264) playback - Acmelabs’ Blog
  9. Pingback: NVIDIA’s VDPAU version 180.11 hardware acceleration for HD content (H.264) with major improvements. - Acmelabs’ Blog
  10. Pingback: xine-vdpau - the first contact | Acmelabs' Blog
  13. Pingback: VDPAU bug report

  14. really good, but it would have saved me some work if you put the suported list in the begining. damm nvidia¬¬

  15. @nande
    Hold it! This is very much outdated. All Nvidia cards beginning with 8xxx suppose to work now.
    Please consider the posting date, and please look here at this Blog for a recent VDPAU article.
    The current nvidia drivers do support VDPAU out of the box, and a recent mplayer checkout doesn’t need special treatment anymore.

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