VLC with VDPAU on Ubuntu Natty Narwhal

[Pericles]

I have been browsing a bunch of posts about using VDPAU with VLC, but some are old, they ask you to compile this and that, etc.

My question is simple:

I have a barebone with a processor HD capable: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz.

I have Ubuntu Natty Narwhal installed on it.

I then installed the most recent NVIDIA driver: 270.41.19, and finally VLC (from the n-muench repository).

But, when trying to play HD streams (tests done with an MPTS file from an IPTV record), it visibly does not work. CPU goes up to more than 110% usage (I see it with top).

However, MPlayer (via SMPlayer) gives an excellent result, it plays the file smoothly with CPU usage under 10%. So, I guess VDPAU libraries are correctly installed.

What do I need to make it work with VLC?

Thanks in advance.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC can only use VDPAU through VAAPI. And then, it only really helps if the GPU can decode to memory fast. Otherwise, it will be even slower than with CPU decoding.

[Pericles]

Thanks, Rémi, but how I force VLC to use this library?

Is it necessary to recompile VLC for this or can I use the packaged version as I have it installed? (This is "VLC media player 1.1.9 The Luggage").

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

run vainfo to check if all works

Then run vlc --ffmpeg-hw

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Ubuntu VLC has support for VAAPI compiled-in.

[Pericles]

No luck, that command shows a problem with libva:

$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.1
Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

[Pericles]

It looks like libva is broken in Natty, according to this bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/774667

I already tried to compile this library from source*, but I ended up with the same problem when running vainfo.

* I am testing two different systems, one a job, one at home. This one at home is now an ASRock ION 330HT (Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz). I don't want to mess up a lot with it, because XBMC, SMPlayer and MythTV are working well with VDPAU, but what I really neeed is to make VLC work well in the other box.