[SOLVED] Anyone successful in installing vdpau in Squeeze for Nvidia Ion?

jlinkels · 10-17-2011, 06:50 PM

I have been trying to enable hardware acceleration for decoding H.264, but until now without success.

Hardware is Nvidia Ion:
nVidia Corporation GT218 [ION] rev 162

I am using the proprietary Nvidia driver, installed by the Nvidia installer:
Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org Video Driver

Kernel: 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP

vdpau:
jlinkels@donald-pc:~$ dpkg --get-selections | grep vdpau
libvdpau1 install
nvidia-libvdpau1 install
nvidia-vdpau-driver install
vdpau-va-driver install

libva:
jlinkels@donald-pc:~$ dpkg --get-selections | grep libva
libva-x11-1 install
libva1 install

When I run the vainfo command:

Code:

jlinkels@donald-pc:~$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.0
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
vainfo: vdpau_driver.c:189: vdpau_do_Initialize: Assertion `vdp_status == VDP_STATUS_OK' failed.
Aborted

All packages are from Squeeze. If someone tried this and has it satisfactorily running using Wheezey packages, please let me know as well.

jlinkels

jlinkels · 10-22-2011, 11:18 AM

I think I definitely made progress.

After installing the latest proprietary NVIDIA driver (285.05.09) vainfo returned without errors.

But VLC (1.1.3) performance was as bad as it used to be. The checkbox Hardware acceleration remained grayed out.

Then I pulled the latest VLC (1.1.12) in from Debian Sid, together with two dozen other updated packages.

Ironically vainfo now returns errors again, but checking Hardware acceleration in VLC made a huge difference for playing H.264 movies. Apart from a few occasional freezes (when the camera pans or zooms out) the picture is smooth. No long freezes, no distortion, no blocks.

Setting the post-processing level from 6 to 0 even further reduces the freezes at the cost of some small and acceptable artifacts during movements.

Remarkably is that before doing this upgrades, one of the 4 cores of the Atom would be pinned at 99% CPU load. Now after these upgrades, CPU load of a single core is 80-100%, but from time to time this load jumps to a different core.

I haven't seen any adverse effects yet from pulling in these upgrades, even compositing still works in KDE4.

jlinkels

jlinkels · 10-22-2011, 11:35 AM

Hmmm, upgraded two more packages to sid:
libvdpau1 and vdpau-va-driver
which removed:
nvidia-libvdpau1
and now vainfo returns:

Code:

jlinkels@donald-pc:~$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.32.0
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 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.32
vainfo: Driver version: Splitted-Desktop Systems VDPAU backend for VA-API - 0.7.3
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4AdvancedSimple    : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD

CPU load now doesn't come over 80% for a single core, but at the same time the other cores are loaded higher: 20-40% each.

Playback of H.264 is completely satisfactory up to now.

jlinkels