The release of Karmic Koala inspired me to upgrade to this new Ubuntu 9.10 version and also to install the latest My Media System (a light Media Center for Linux), wich is version 1.1.2 actually. All was fine, beside the playback of AVCHD footage from my Canon HF100 FullHD camcorder. I’ve noticed already some time ago, AVCHD footage doesn’t work with the ‘-fps 50‘ switch anymore. The solution for the problem, so I wrote, was to use ‘-correct-pts‘ instead. What was working on Intel Q6600, doesn’t work on a AMD Athlon 5050e. After two days of part-time investigation, I’ve found out, that even the SVN mplayer doesn’t play back AVCHD footage anymore. But – and this the good news – the Nvidia maintained mplayer from ftp://download.nvidia.com does!

The version Karmic offers atm, is: rc3+svn20090426, but it says ‘NO VIDEO‘, if you use -vo vdpau and -vc ffh264vdpau, and the video doesn’t show up at all. The MplayerHQ version is svn-29809 right now, and if you provide ‘correct-pts’, the video starts playing normally, but after one single skip/seek, the playback is only as half as fast – actually it looks like slow motion. Using ‘-demuxer lavf‘ crashed in both cases and I had to reboot.
Nvidia’s version of mplayer is vdpau-29354, it works like a charm, not only it provides two additional features, the other two version doesn’t have, it works with the ‘-fps 50‘ switch. The two new features are:

• hardware acceleration support for AVI with -vc ffodivxvdpau
• High quality scaling: -vo vdpau:hqscaling=1

HOWTO
And here’s a step by step HOWTO

1. Uninstall mplayer, if you have installed it with a package manager:
   

   aptitude remove mplayer

   or if you built and installed it from SVN. Go into the source coude directory, and perform there:

   make uninstall

2. Meet all dependencies mplayer need for proper and full featured compilation:

   apt-get build-dep mplayer

   install subversion

   aptitude install subversion

3. Download and unpack Nvidia’s downloader, and run it:

   wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/mplayer-vdpau-4789364.tar.bz2
   tar xfvj mplayer-vdpau-4789364.tar.bz2
   cd mplayer-vdpau-4789364
   sh checkout-patch-build.sh
   cd mplayer-vdpau

4. mplayer isn’t installed yet. What is missing is an ‘make install’. It’s up to you, to go the last step. You can invoke mplayer directly from the folder, where it was built, without installing it. E.g.:

   ./mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau <my AVCHD footage>.mts -fps 50

   you have to change -fps 50 to -fps 60, if you are using NTSC (USA).

5. alternatively you can install is with checkinstall:

   checkinstall -D --pkgversion=1 -y && dpkg -i mplayer_1-1_amd64.deb

   The package name may vary, because you might have a 32bit system. Use my package from above with care, it’s better you build it yourself.

6. run mplayer now:

   mplayer -vo vdpau:deint=2:sharpen=1:hqscaling=1 -vc ffh264vdpau <my AVCHD footage>.mts -fps 50

   You can play with the values. Decrease deint on slow hardware, or use chroma-deint instead if graphics card memory is low (e.g. 128MB)

7. Troubleshooting
   • Don’t use a window manager, but xinit -e mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ...
   • Explicitly disable compositing, even if you don’t use it in your window manager like (KDE4, Gnome, whatever)
     

     nvidia-xsettings --no-composite

     This will alter your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. A backup will be created. This will prevent tearing

   • I had to use the switch -demuxer lavf for Matroska (.mkv) files, don’t use the -fps xx or deint switch here. Most Matroska videos you’ve downloaded have 23.976fps, respectively they aren’t interlaced .
   • “NO VIDEO”: check if you have really compiled in vdpau support.
     

     mplayer -vo help | grep vdpau

     you must see a

     vdpau VDPAU with X11

     If not, you don’t have nvidia-xxx-libvdpau-dev installed. Install the version you need. ( apt-get install … ). See what version nvidia-xxx-libvdpau has (dpkg -l | grep vdpau ) , and insert the same number for the ‘-dev’ package. Delete the mplayer-vdpau folder in the mplayer-vdpau-4789364 directory, and rerun the whole process from scratch.