Newest Nvidia Driver 180.35 ships with vc-1 support

[WalterK]

The newest Nvidia Linux Driver 180.35 now ships with vc-1 vdpau support for all video cards that support vdpau 8XXX-9XXXgt also additional support for the new series of cards GeForce GT 120, GeForce G100 and Quadro FX 3700M.
I'll be downloading the driver to test out vdpau vc-1 support with the latest svn mplayer and maybe they fixed the color space problem if you tried to encode vc-1 files to x264.
What this means for those who are not encoding is that now vc-1 files no longer eat up your cpu once you are using the driver on a card that supports vdpau.


The 180.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86 is available for download via FTP. (ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.35/)
The 180.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86-64 is available for download via FTP (ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.35/).

[nm]

I'll be downloading the driver to test out vdpau vc-1 support with the latest svn mplayer and maybe they fixed the color space problem if you tried to encode vc-1 files to x264.
I don't think MPlayer/MEncoder can (yet) use VDPAU for decoding when you intend to process the decoded video further -- the current code only supports direct display.
If there are VDPAU-related encoding problems, you may need to tell MEncoder to use a software decoder instead of the VDPAU codecs: "mencoder -vc ffh264,ffvc1, [...]"

[WalterK]

The previous vdpau drivers didn't have vc-1 decoding for my gpu (9800gt) so mplayer usally fell back to the vc1 ffmpeg implementation when playing back vc-1 video.
I only discovered the colorspace error a few days ago when trying to encode some vc-1 media to x264 with h264enc (it searches for the vdpau vc-1 which isn't there since my gpu didn't have the support for with the previous drivers), there is a patch from the nvidia but it requires x264 not be compiled into mplayer.

[nm]

And forcing the codec doesn't help? It can be done in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf too (add a line with "vc=ffh264,ffvc1,") if h264enc doesn't allow you to tune the -vc parameter.

[WalterK]

Well update, after some compiling i was able to get vc-1 files to work with h264enc using the vdpau presets as well as regular x264 presets
a quick fyi add this from svn while within your mplayer folder after getting the svn version of mplayer or you will end up with segmentation fault when trying to playback with vdpau.


svn up -r 17562 libavcodec/utils.c libavcodec/internal.h libavcodec/mpeg12.c libavcodec/h263dec.c libavcodec/h264.c

Recommended on the nvidia forums without having to use the patches that disable x264/libx264