LINUX 24Hz 24fps playback ? [Archive]

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saptecai

25th February 2009, 22:28

In LINUX, what graphics card can do 24Hz (24fps) at 1920x1080p ?

I recently bought a plasma screen which allegedly supports 24fps input with 4:4 pull down. I currently have a ATI 7500 and in XP with Powerstrip did not help in getting 24Hz out of it. I need a new graphics card and LINUX compatibility would be a bonus. Passive cooling another.

Thanks

26th February 2009, 00:37

saptecai

27th February 2009, 00:15

That's useful, thanks

Do you this would to the trick?

OcUK GeForce 6200 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (AGP) - Retail

It doesn't specifically mention 24Hz which is the main feature I am looking to rid of my good old Radeon 7500

saptecai

27th February 2009, 00:37

I have seen it doesn't do 1080p therefore... I stay away.

I might have to change my mother board and buy into PCI-E.

oldcpu

20th March 2009, 14:54

Pretty much all ATI and NVIDIA cards from the last few generations support 1080p24. However, there are no easy choices for you since you have an AGP motherboard and most of the current cards are only available for PCIe -- especially NVIDIA. There are some ATI Radeon HD 3xxx models for AGP and an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS PCI that can be added to your current system.I'm pretty much in the same boat, but worse :) I found 4 different nVidia GeForce 8400 GS PCI (not PCI-e) cards (from PNY, eVGA, BFG and Sparkle) but they are all for 64-bit PC and not 32-bit, ... and of course my PCs are so old they only have 32-bit PCI slots.

I have decided to purchase a new Intel Core i7 based PC, probably with a nVidia 9800 GFX+ graphics ... but I don't want to throw my old 32-bit PCs out, ... I plan to keep them connected via a KVM to the same monitor as my planned new PC. But if I switch from VGA to DVI for my monitor, then I'll have to put an inexpensive card in my old PCs to output DVI.

Looking at AGP cards, I noted there is not much in the line of nVidia AGP (an NX6800 was the best AGP I could find, and its not clear to me if that card's vdpau implementation is a complete or partial PV1 (Pure Video) 1st generation equivalent). But I was surprised to note there are ATI Radeon 2400 PRO, 2600 PRO, 3450, 3650 and 3850 AGP cards. Radeon do off load some decoding to the GPU (via avivo). ... How much (if any) HD playback (via offloading decoding to the GPU) is supported under Linux , either via the Radeon openGL driver or via the proprietary Radeon drivers?

20th March 2009, 17:33

I'm pretty much in the same boat, but worse :) I found 4 different nVidia GeForce 8400 GS PCI (not PCI-e) cards (from PNY, eVGA, BFG and Sparkle) but they are all for 64-bit PC and not 32-bit, ... and of course my PCs are so old they only have 32-bit PCI slots.
All those cards are for the normal 32-bit PCI bus. "64-bit" refers to the width of the internal memory bus on the card. Take a look at the photos (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133245) at Newegg, for example. 64-bit PCI connectors are much longer and releasing such cards wouldn't make any sense.

Looking at AGP cards, I noted there is not much in the line of nVidia AGP (an NX6800 was the best AGP I could find, and its not clear to me if that card's vdpau implementation is a complete or partial PV1 (Pure Video) 1st generation equivalent).
The VDPAU API only supports VP2/3. Although VP1 hardware provides decent deinterlacing and denoising capabilities, they are only available on Windows. However, MPEG-2 decoding does work on Linux through XvMC with these cards.

Some GeForce 7xxx cards are also available for AGP. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_Series

But I was surprised to note there are ATI Radeon 2400 PRO, 2600 PRO, 3450, 3650 and 3850 AGP cards. Radeon do off load some decoding to the GPU (via avivo). ... How much (if any) HD playback (via offloading decoding to the GPU) is supported under Linux , either via the Radeon openGL driver or via the proprietary Radeon drivers?
Currently there is no way to use the UVD hardware decoder of these cards in Linux. As I said above, also normal video playback is somewhat problematic with fglrx because of tearing issues -- syncing to the display's vertical blanking only works in OpenGL surfaces. Fortunately many video players (MPlayer, Xine, MythTV, XBMC, ...) can be configured to use OpenGL instead of XVideo (XBMC uses OpenGL by default), but not so many users know this.

ATI has been developing UVD support behind the scenes with their XvBA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Video_Bitstream_Acceleration) API, but it has not been officially published and there is no programming information available.

oldcpu

20th March 2009, 20:02

All those cards are for the normal 32-bit PCI bus. "64-bit" refers to the width of the internal memory bus on the card. Take a look at the photos (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133245) at Newegg, for example. 64-bit PCI connectors are much longer and releasing such cards wouldn't make any sense. I'm new to purchasing new hardware (I've always had oldpc's in the past (hence my handle)), and I'm attempting to brush up on this, but its not clear to me. I've wasted a silly amount of time looking at this. Take a look at these pix for the 8400GS PCI BFG card and also the 8400GS PCI Sparkle card:
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp?id=86&sub_id=238 (look at the 2nd pix, not the top pci-e pix).
It does not look like any of those, with their slots, will fit into my 32-bit PC's PCI slot.

That PNY pix is interesting ... but unfortunately I have not been able to find one supplier of that PNY card in Europe. ... I'll keep looking.

The VDPAU API only supports VP2/3. Although VP1 hardware provides decent deinterlacing and denoising capabilities, they are only available on Windows. However, MPEG-2 decoding does work on Linux through XvMC with these cards.

Some GeForce 7xxx cards are also available for AGP. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_Series Our local PC store has a 7600 AGP card in stock (from MSI), but its not cheap (around 99 euros for a 512MB card): http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=136&prod_no=1608
.. and the GeForce 7xxx only have VP1 ... I'm not sure how much benefit one gets from the limited MPEG-2 decoding, as most AVCHD camcorders appear to be using H.264 encoding.

Currently there is no way to use the UVD hardware decoder of these cards in Linux. I find this confusing. For example this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njc4Ng

I had thought the avivo (that is provided by ATI Radeon) was also supported under Linux for MPEG-2 decoding.

My reference for that avivo is a very old article here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=620&num=1

........ Now if I could only find that PNY 8400 GS PCI (32-bit) card.

oldcpu

20th March 2009, 20:25

I'm new to purchasing new hardware (I've always had oldpc's in the past (hence my handle)), and I'm attempting to brush up on this, but its not clear to me. I've wasted a silly amount of time looking at this. Take a look at these pix for the 8400GS PCI BFG card and also the 8400GS PCI Sparkle card:
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp?id=86&sub_id=238 (look at the 2nd pix, not the top pci-e pix).
It does not look like any of those, with their slots, will fit into my 32-bit PC's PCI slot.

That PNY pix is interesting ... but unfortunately I have not been able to find one supplier of that PNY card in Europe. ... I'll keep looking.

I just looked again ... I still can't find a single supplier of the PNY 8400 GS PCI card (in Europe). I did find suppliers of the PCI-e variant in the UK and in France.

Reference 32-bit vs 64-bit, ... here are the links I examined:
PCI wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
PCI pix/drawings illustrating differences: http://www94.web.cern.ch/hsi/s-link/devices/s32pci64/slottypes.html Now its possible that the extra connectors on the BFG and Sparkle 8400 GS cards are just for the 64-bit bus, and they will still function in my old 32-bit PCI based motherboard (it has a PCI v.2.2), but I'm not very clear on that, and I'm not so sure I want to take the chance given I need to order out of country (hence extra shipping charges). The suppliers of the Sparkle 8400GS card (in Europe) are all out of stock, and I could only find suppliers in Switzerland for the BFG card. I can find suppliers in North America (for the PNY, BFG, Sparkle, and eVGA 8400GS PCI cards), but the shipping by some suppliers more than doubles the price of the card.

20th March 2009, 21:16

I'm new to purchasing new hardware (I've always had oldpc's in the past (hence my handle)), and I'm attempting to brush up on this, but its not clear to me. I've wasted a silly amount of time looking at this. Take a look at these pix for the 8400GS PCI BFG card and also the 8400GS PCI Sparkle card:
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp?id=86&sub_id=238 (look at the 2nd pix, not the top pci-e pix).
It does not look like any of those, with their slots, will fit into my 32-bit PC's PCI slot.
All those cards have the same universal 32-bit PCI connector. See the figure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCI_Keying.png) at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on PCI bus. The connector is the third from the top at the left side: "Universal (3.3V & 5V) 32-bit PCI card". It will fit just fine in your PCI slots.

Our local PC store has a 7600 AGP card in stock (from MSI), but its not cheap (around 99 euros for a 512MB card): http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=136&prod_no=1608
.. and the GeForce 7xxx only have VP1 ... I'm not sure how much benefit one gets from the limited MPEG-2 decoding, as most AVCHD camcorders appear to be using H.264 encoding.
No benefit. If you can't find a PCI 8400 GS, it would make more sense to get an older GeForce 5xxx or 6xxx from ebay. Those cards have the same video capabilities as GeForce 7xxx on Linux.

I find this confusing. For example this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njc4Ng
Basically they now have the support in the driver (or it looks like that) but nobody knows how to use the interface until ATI provides documentation or examples. That hes not happened yet, but maybe later this year...

I had thought the avivo (that is provided by ATI Radeon) was also supported under Linux for MPEG-2 decoding.
Nope, never has been. The "Avivo" support under Linux is only video scaling and colorspace conversion (YUV->RGB) through the XVideo interface. Pretty much all graphics cards released since late 90s provide XVideo support.

oldcpu

20th March 2009, 22:00

All those cards have the same universal 32-bit PCI connector. See the figure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCI_Keying.png) at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on PCI bus. The connector is the third from the top at the left side: "Universal (3.3V & 5V) 32-bit PCI card". It will fit just fine in your PCI slots. After reading your 1st post reply to mine, and this more recent post, it has given me some hope, and I'm reconsidering this. I've got my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard users manual out, and I'm studying the picture of the motherboard, trying to see if the real estate between the PCI slots and the chassis (capacitors, resistors and stuff) will allow a 64-bit card to fit. From what I have read a 32-bit card has 124 pins and a 64-bit 184 pins, so presumably the 60-pins remaining are associated with the extra 64-data bus lines. Presumably the card's firmware (or driver software) can cope with that data missing? I'm not so sure my assumptions are good here.

The power supply on my old PC is 360 watts. The graphic card spec recommends a minimum of 300 watts, I believe. Plus the 8400 GS are pretty much a low power card, from what I have read.

Pondering a 64-bit graphic card in a 32-bit PCI, ... obviously the bandwidth will be significantly less going from the PC's 32-bit CPU, over the 32-bit PCI, to the graphic card's GPU. But since we are not talking games here, I'm thinking maybe bandwidth is not the limitation (in an old PC) but rather its the old athlon-2800 CPU does not have the "horsepower" to decode the H.264, while the the nVidia 8400GS GPU would be able to decode at some resolutions (possibly not at 1920x1080, but maybe one or two levels down). Hence presumably then, putting an 8400 GS in the 32-bit PCI slot would offload the H.264 decoding to the GPU, and maybe then while the 32-bit bandwidth would be a limitation, it would not be as bad as the current situation (with athlon-2800 and nVidia FX 5200), and HD videos would play back better.

No benefit. If you can't find a PCI 8400 GS, it would make more sense to get an older GeForce 5xxx or 6xxx from ebay. Those cards have the same video capabilities as GeForce 7xxx on Linux. I'm assuming a 64-bit nVidia 8400 GS card in a 32-bit PCI slot would still give better performance than a nvidia 6600 or 6800 or 7600 card in an AGP slot for H.264 video decoding (I'm not interested in games, other than chess, and chess pieces don't move that fast :) ).

As noted, my PC's motherboard has a GeForce FX-5200 already, although it does not have a DVI output, and even if the 8400GS PCI does not work, I may purchase an AGP graphic card just to get the DVI output.

But I still need to reassure myself that the BFG card 8400 GS (available in Switzerland) will work in my PC. (Not sure how to do that - maybe a good night sleep :) ). .... If it does (work), I'll jump on the phone ASAP and order it.

Basically they now have the support in the driver (or it looks like that) but nobody knows how to use the interface until ATI provides documentation or examples. That hes not happened yet, but maybe later this year... ... which means there is hope for ATI, but its moving very slowly. ... and here I thought things moved slowly where I work. :) ...

The "Avivo" support under Linux is only video scaling and colorspace conversion (YUV->RGB) through the XVideo interface. Pretty much all graphics cards released since late 90s provide XVideo support.Interesting to learn. ....

Researching all this takes a lot of time, when one is coming up from square zero.

I'm still planning on purchasing an Intel Core i7 , possibly with a nVidia 9800 GTX++ (mainly for video editing of AVCHD) , but having a backup PC that is much slower, but still functional, would be useful.

21st March 2009, 00:07

After reading your 1st post reply to mine, and this more recent post, it has given me some hope, and I'm reconsidering this. I've got my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard users manual out, and I'm studying the picture of the motherboard, trying to see if the real estate between the PCI slots and the chassis (capacitors, resistors and stuff) will allow a 64-bit card to fit. From what I have read a 32-bit card has 124 pins and a 64-bit 184 pins, so presumably the 60-pins remaining are associated with the extra 64-data bus lines.
You are still mixing 64-bit memory bandwidth with 64-bit PCI bus. As I explained, these graphics cards have a standard 32-bit PCI bus with less than 124 pins in the connector (you can count them from the photos if you wish). They work perfectly with all normal desktop motherboards that have PCI 2.x slots, including your Asus A7N8X Deluxe.

The "64-bit" part in the graphics card specs means that the memory bus between the onboard graphics memory and the GPU core is 64 bits wide. This implies that the card is a low-end model. Faster cards have 128-bit, 256-bit or even wider memory buses. This memory bus width value has nothing to do with the PCI/AGP/PCIe interface. It is an internal property of the card.

I'm thinking maybe bandwidth is not the limitation (in an old PC) but rather its the old athlon-2800 CPU does not have the "horsepower" to decode the H.264, while the the nVidia 8400GS GPU would be able to decode at some resolutions (possibly not at 1920x1080, but maybe one or two levels down). Hence presumably then, putting an 8400 GS in the 32-bit PCI slot would offload the H.264 decoding to the GPU, and maybe then while the 32-bit bandwidth would be a limitation, it would not be as bad as the current situation (with athlon-2800 and nVidia FX 5200), and HD videos would play back better.
Yes, even the PCI version of 8400 GS should decode high-bitrate 1920x1080 (24p, 25i/p, 30i/p) H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 video perfectly. Only post-processing, like deinterlacing and denoising, is a bit limited by the card's small number of stream processors (shaders). The best deinterlacing mode doesn't work for 1080i video, but I've heard that there is not much difference to the second best mode, which should work fine.

But I still need to reassure myself that the BFG card 8400 GS (available in Switzerland) will work in my PC. (Not sure how to do that - maybe a good night sleep :) ). .... If it does (work), I'll jump on the phone ASAP and order it.
Rest assured, it does work :)

oldcpu

21st March 2009, 08:24

You are still mixing 64-bit memory bandwidth with 64-bit PCI bus. As I explained, these graphics cards have a standard 32-bit PCI bus with less than 124 pins in the connector (you can count them from the photos if you wish). They work perfectly with all normal desktop motherboards that have PCI 2.x slots, including your Asus A7N8X Deluxe.Yes, it appears when reading the specs I am mixing 64-bit memory bandwidth with 64-bit PCI bus.

As you noted, the pix for the 3 x GS8400 Cards all appear to have a 32-bit PCI card:
BFG: http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx
Sparkle: http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp?id=86&sub_id=238
PNY: (newegg photos): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133245
eVGA: http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=512-P1-N724-LR&family=GeForce%208%20Series%20Family

After waking up this AM, I actually did some time looking at the pix on all of those sites ! :) I found very detailed pix for the BFG, PNY, and eVGA. Again, this confirmed your observation that they all seem to be of the "universal 3.5 and 5.5 volt 32-bit PCI cards". Thats good news for me. :)

To provide myself more confidence, I then compared those pix to these articles explaining a bit about PCI cards, with great pix/sketches:
http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/pci-pci-x-pci-express-oh-boy/
http://www.playtool.com/pages/vidslots/slots.html
Again, the 8400 GS cards (depicted on the various web sites) shape matches that of the "universal 3.5 and 5.5 volt 32-bit PCI card" type depicted in the tutorials on PCI cards.

Of course my old A7N8X motherboard has old 5.5 volt PCI slots http://www.gamepyre.com/hardwared.html?aid=43&p=1 , but those "universal" 8400GS PCI graphic cards should still work in it. I also checked my PC's power supply capability to handle the new card, and I am confident it will be ok with the BFG card (which states 300W power suppy required, and the old PC case with my motherboard has a 360W power supply).

This all supports your very precise and correct technical assessment. Many thanks! I would have not pursued this further, if you had not brought me back "on track".

oldcpu

22nd March 2009, 19:10

They work perfectly with all normal desktop motherboards that have PCI 2.x slots, including your Asus A7N8X Deluxe. ......Rest assured, it does work :)I ordered the BFG 8400GS card by mail order yesterday, based primarily on my earlier research (for wanting an 8400GS), and also based upon my being educated on this thread re: your explanations reference PCI. Since I had to order out of country, this could take a couple of weeks. Later today (about a day after I ordered that card), I received an email from BFG support (in response to a compatibility query of mine) that in their assessment, the card should work in my motherboard. Good news!

Having an 8400 PCI card in the house also means I can try it out on a couple other old PCs we have in our house:
a sempron-2600 on an Epox motherboard and
a athlon-1100 on an even older MSI motherboard). I'm not going to hold my breath on the athlon-1100 being able to play HD video well, but it should be fun trying. :)

22nd March 2009, 20:29

Having an 8400 PCI card in the house also means I can try it out on a couple other old PCs we have in our house:
a sempron-2600 on an Epox motherboard and
a athlon-1100 on an even older MSI motherboard). I'm not going to hold my breath on the athlon-1100 being able to play HD video well, but it should be fun trying. :)
Indeed, I'd be interested in hearing how well the card works in that system and also generally. PCI is much slower interface than AGP, so using the card for other tasks than hardware video decoding may be a bit frustrating. On the other hand, I've had a PCI 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 as a secondary video adapter until last year and it performed quite nicely in standard desktop use with a 1024x768 resolution.

oldcpu

22nd March 2009, 21:42

oldcpu

24th March 2009, 06:58

Indeed, I'd be interested in hearing how well the card works in that system and also generally. .
I don't expect smooth 1080i 24Hz 24fps decoding from the card. But on the other hand, the old PCs I am using can NOT currently (without the card) smoothly play back ANY of the videos on this page: http://www.h264info.com/clips.html and I am anticipating (hoping) as a TEST that the nVidia 8400GS card will help there with playback some of those clips.

oldcpu

5th April 2009, 09:09

Indeed, I'd be interested in hearing how well the card works in that system and also generally. PCI is much slower interface than AGP, so using the card for other tasks than hardware video decoding may be a bit frustrating. On the other hand, I've had a PCI 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 as a secondary video adapter until last year and it performed quite nicely in standard desktop use with a 1024x768 resolution.

As noted, I ordered the BFG 8400GS PCI card last week. Card specs here: http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx . The card just arrived by mail yesterday and I could not resist playing with this card in my oldest PC, so I gave that priority and tried it out. For the testing on my openSUSE-11.1 PCs, all running KDE-3.5.10, I did not custom compile MPlayer, but rather I used an rpm packaged by the Packman packagers, who are a group of packagers who package rpms for openSUSE. Packman Packager for openSUSE - MPlayer (http://packman.links2linux.de/package/mplayer)

Hence I tested the latest packged packman MPlayer-1.0rc2_r29116-2.pm2 on a 9 year old PC (athlon-1100 (1GB RAM) with the new nVidia 8400GS graphic card noted above) running openSUSE-11.1 with KDE-3.5.10. This old PC has a 1x/2x/4x AGP slot (no PCI-e bus). I removed the PC's existing nVidia MX400 (64MB) AGP graphic card (which had been using the openGL driver for nvidia) and replaced it with the nVidia 8400GS PCI card and then I installed the nvidia proprietary 180.44 graphic driver.

With the nVidia 8400GS, and MPlayer, and the Nvidia proprietary 180.44 graphic driver, this old PC was able to smoothly play back 2 of the H.264 trailer videos from this web site that I tried: H.264 Demo Clips « H264info.com (http://www.h264info.com/clips.html)

The two successful videos that were played back were Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - 720p Trailer, and Serenity - 720p “On HD DVD” Trailer. They BOTH have LOTS and LOTS of movement. The playback had problems playing back a 3rd video trailer: I Am Legend - 1080p Trailer (more details on that problem later - I obtained the typical green MPlayer VDPAU screen after 10 seconds or so of playback).

For example, in the cases that worked, with MPlayer, playing Serenity trailer on the 9-year old athlon-1100 with the 8400GS PCI card and VDPAU, the video played smoothly, and the athlon-1100 CPU load of MPlayer was only 4% to 5% load. Trying to play the video without VDPAU on that old PC results in the video freezing. This freezing without VDPAU was also true on that old PC with the MX400 AGP card (that was removed). The Serenity trailer is H.264 encoded, 1280x720, at 4.8MB/sec with LOTS and LOTS of movement.

Playing the same Serenity trailer video on a 5-year old athlon-2800 (2GB) with nVidia FX5200 AGP (128MB RAM) and openSUSE-11.1/KDE-3.5.10 with MPlayer (without VDPAU) resulted in 75% cpu being used by mplayer and 18% Xorg and the video played poorly, jerking and with a massive audio/video desynch (ie it was NOT watchable on the athlon-2800 with the FX5200 AGP graphic card).

Playing the same Serenity video on a 6-month old (Dell Studio 15 laptop) with Intel Core2 Duo P8400 with Radeon HD3450 (openSUSE-11.1/KDE-3.5.10) with MPlayer resulted in 70% cpu from MPlayer, but that very new laptop PC gave a smooth video playback.

The downside to this new hardware was the nVida 8400GS 180.44 proprietary graphic driver was very unstable on KDE-3.5.10 on the athlon-1100 doing regular (non-multimedia related) functions. I was not able to get more than a couple of hours operation with out the graphics failing and a reboot being required. On a KDE4 install, the proprietary nVidia driver was mostly non-functional with only minute or two of operation before a freeze on KDE4. Hence the PC is debateably not useful with this lack of stability, and hopefully nVidia will continue to improve the stability of their driver with.

When using the VESA desktop graphic driver driver with the nVidia 8400 GS PCI card on this old athlon-1100 PC (where there is no VDPAU support with VESA driver), the PC is stable, but very slow (slower than the MX400 AGP card with the openGL driver).

Its possible this new BFG 8400GS PCI graphic card is not completely compatible with the old PCI bus on this athlon-1100, and in a week or two I hope to try it out on the slightly newer (5 year old) athlon-2800 PC mentioned above.

On the web site where I noted I obtained the test videos, the I Am Legend - 1080p Trailer would run on MPlayer for about 10 seconds and then fail with a solid green screen, with a series of errors, such as: [vdpau] failed VDPAU decoder rendering: An invalid handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_video_mixer_render : An invalid handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_device_destroy : An invalid handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_presentation_queue_display : An invalid handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_presentation_queue_block_until_surface_idle : An invalid handle value was provided

But given NONE of these videos could be played BEFORE, the new 8400GS card using MPlayer with vdpau was installed is a big improvement. But clearly its also experimental (due to the lack of stability).

As a further note, I also saw the same green screen failures (anywhere from seconds to minutes into playing a video) with MPlayer and VDPAU when playing back a standard DVD compliant MPEG2 file (720x480, NTSC (29.97 fps), 2.845Mb/sec). Those failures are not too serious from a practical perspective, as those videos can be played without VDPAU on the same graphic PCI card and same PC (albeit without VDPAU there is 75% CPU load as opposed to 5% CPU load with VDPAU). But MPEG2 DVD format is very common, so clearly there are problems here, either with the nVidia 180.44 driver or with the MPlayer VDPAU implementation.

In summary, both the nVidia 180.44 graphic driver, and the VDPAU driver in ffmpeg/mplayer are not stable yet (on this 9-year old PC) with the BFG 8400GS (512MB) PCI graphic card, and the driver/software is STILL experimental as is noted. However it has TREMENDOUS potential for breathing new life into a very old PC.

I'll likely be trying this nVidia 8400GS PCI card on a 5-year old Athlon-2800 sometime in the next few weeks.

oldcpu

1st May 2009, 20:17

The downside to this new hardware was the nVida 8400GS 180.44 proprietary graphic driver was very unstable on KDE-3.5.10 on the athlon-1100 doing regular (non-multimedia related) functions. I was not able to get more than a couple of hours operation with out the graphics failing and a reboot being required. On a KDE4 install, the proprietary nVidia driver was mostly non-functional with only minute or two of operation before a freeze on KDE4. Hence the PC is debateably not useful with this lack of stability, and hopefully nVidia will continue to improve the stability of their driver with.

This is just a post to correct the quoted qualification. It turns out the problems I experienced with VDPAU on the BFG nVidia GeForce 8400 GS (512MB) PCI card were specific to an old PC. ...

VDPAU (and the playback of High Definition Videos) works great with this card on a different PC.

Specifically, I removed the BFG nVidia GeForce 8400GS PCI (512MB) graphic card out of the PC in which I was using it (an older (9+ years) athlon-1100 PC with an MSI KT3 ultra motherboard) where that PC was having the problems with the desktop.

I put the BFG nVidia GeForce 8400GS PCI (512MB) graphic card in my slightly newer athlon-2800 PC (+4 years old Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard ) and installed the proprietary nVidia driver (180.51) and KDE-3.5.10 w/openSUSE-11.1 works great. No corruption. vdpau works fabulous on this athlon-2800 with the 8400GS card.

I'm thinking now the problems I experienced on the athlon-1100 were PC specific, ... either
the power supply on the 9 year old PC was simply too old, or
there was a problem with interrupts, or
it was just a basic compatibility between the motherboard on that 9 year old PC and the graphic card.

I have successfully played back a number of H.264 High Definition videos (that the old athlon-2800 with a nvidia FX5200 could not handle) with the athlon-2800 with the 8400GS card.

So I am happy to report success on this and I can recommend the BFG nVidia GeForce 8400GS (PCI) card to PCs of the same vintage as my athlon-2800 ! It provides a High Definition Video playback capability that this old PC simply did not have before.