[mdlug] VDPAU (was: Preliminary report - Samsung HMX-H105 HD camcorder)

[Ingles, Raymond]

> Apparently there's an NVidia video acceleration API called VDPAU that
> came out fairly recently, which should help considerably if I can set
it
> up. I'll report on that once I get the time to mess around more.

 Well, following the directions here:

 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1037625

 ...I got VDPAU ("Video Decode and Presentation APU for Unix",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU) working last night. It does indeed
make a big difference for the video formats it supports - the AVC video
from the camcorder now plays smoothly and with negligible CPU usage,
whereas before it pegged one core of my 2.8GHz Athlon X2 and still
dropped some frames. Right now, it supports MPEG and MPEG2, h264/AVC,
WMV3, and VC1.

 Note that VDPAU *doesn't* support MPEG4/h263 (including the variations
DIVX & Xvid). However, that's a fairly CPU-friendly family of codecs,
and doesn't give my system any trouble. To make mplayer try VDPAU by
default, I had to edit my "~/.mplayer/config" file and add the lines:

 vo=vdpau
 vc=ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,

 (including the final comma). It still falls back to regular software
decoding if the video format isn't supported, like DIVX. Hopefully
this'll all be more-or-less automatic by the next Ubuntu release.

 AMD/ATI's equivalent for this is called XvBA (X-Video Bitstream
Acceleration), though I don't know much about it. Intel also has a video
interface for one of their mobile video chipsets, apparently. A recent
article about all this (and the effort to abstract them into a generic
"VA API", "Video Acceleration API") can be found here:

 http://lwn.net/Articles/338581/

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                           (313) 227-2317

 "I'm like a Twinkie, except instead of filled with cream I'm filled
            with hate. I'm a Hate Twinkie." - Daniel James
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