14.2 MPlayer won't start with NVIDIA driver and older cards (no libvdpau)

ljb643 · 08-02-2016, 06:36 PM

If you are using the NVIDIA driver 304.131, which is the latest one that works on some older cards, then MPlayer under Slackware-14.2 will not work. It did work with the same NVIDIA driver under Slackware-14.1. This is because starting with Slackware-14.2 MPlayer is being built with a dependency on libvdpau, which NVIDIA will not support or provide starting with their driver 304.128 for older cards (such as GeForce 6 or 7 series).

Other than using a different player, or not installing the NVIDIA driver, the work-around is to rebuild MPlayer from the Slackware source, after editing the MPlayer.SlackBuild script to change "--enable-vdpau" to "--disable-vdpau". The version you build will work with the NVIDIA driver.

(There might be another way around this using a libvdpau package from SlackBuilds.org, but I didn't try that. Or, you could try a version of the NVIDIA driver 304 branch older than 304.128.)

dugan · 08-02-2016, 06:43 PM

Eh? What exactly happens when you start MPlayer in this situation? Is there console output that would help us understand this?

I would have expected it to be fine if MPlayer isn't actually using vdpau for decoding or playback. Which it does not do by default (it usually uses opengl or xv for playback, and it typically uses software-based FFMPEG routines to decode).

Drakeo · 08-02-2016, 07:25 PM

Mplayer requires libvdpau. I have been waiting for this to come up. Mplayer must have libvdpau if you disable it no video. But the problem for me was unlike 14.1
14.2 when building kdenlive it caused serious issues with alpha blending. so I would uninstall libvdpau and all was fine but mplayer then was broke.
Libvdpau is no longer part of Nvidia blob. Libvdpau is part of mesa and xorg I think have to look it up. Even the kernel has had changes to get along with on gpu rendering that is what libvdpau is about.
what I did was build libvdpau static and discard the dot .so lib's. now the static part is executable so now I rebuild mplayer automatically grabs the libvdpau.a and links to it. Now gmplayer is all fine and and the latest kdenlive for kde4 builds works fine I am not talking about the one on Slackbuilds..
I will note that the latest builds for alien Bob's kde5 I do not have this issue. I am sure that is because of the mixed qt4 and qt5 builds of the latest kde5.

Quote:

I would have expected it to be fine if MPlayer isn't actually using vdpau for decoding or playback. Which it does not do by default (it usually uses opengl or xv for playback, and it typically uses software-based FFMPEG routines to decode).

It has nothing to do with decoding it is for rendering on gpu. h264 was also taken out of Nvidia also do to h264 licences. And that was how Nvidia did it's rendering and decoding on gpu. Since then this has been pushed to parts of the kernel parts of mesa and parts of xorg.
I run GeForce GTX 960 NVIDIA Driver Version: 367.35
yes it would better to upgrade drivers to a newer version that is for the latest mesa and xorg. this driver works on all from gforce 400 series up if you need the older 340 then use it. run anything older than a gforce 200. I guess you have that issue.

dugan · 08-02-2016, 07:27 PM

Again, you two:

Quote:

Is there console output that would help us understand this?

I assume not, since it sounds like you've both already just gone ahead and fixed it.

Quote:

It has nothing to do with decoding it is for rendering on gpu.

Akshually:

Code:

mplayer -vc ffh264vdpau

willysr · 08-02-2016, 07:33 PM

Everytime you install NVidia driver from NVidia, you need to reinstall libvdpau since it was overwritten by NVidia

ljb643 · 08-02-2016, 08:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan

Eh? What exactly happens when you start MPlayer in this situation? Is there console output that would help us understand this?

Exactly this:

Code:

$ mplayer
mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libvdpau.so.1: cannot open
shared object file: No such file or directory

Quote:

Originally Posted by willysr

Everytime you install NVidia driver from NVidia, you need to reinstall libvdpau since it was overwritten by NVidia

OK, that was interesting and helpful. I thought of trying this, but NVIDIA says no VDPAU with series < 8 cards now. And I know that libvdpau.so shipped in the Slackware package is just a stub, or loader, that needs a vendor-specific library for actual implementation. But it turns out having the loader/stub is enough to get MPlayer started, and MPlayer is smart enough to give up when VDPAU fails and try something else.

MPlayer logs: "[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1" but then it continues, and works.

Not nice of NVIDIA installer to remove that library, then.

allend · 08-02-2016, 11:06 PM

I simply create a symlink after I install the nVidia 340.131 driver

Code:

ln -s /usr/lib64/libvdpau_nvidia.so /usr/lib64/libvdpau.so.1

The hardware is not capable, but the symlink allows mplayer to start.

elcore · 08-03-2016, 01:36 AM

I've compiled ffmpeg and MPlayer 1.3.0 with standard libvdpau that is shipped in Slackware.
Works fine with 340.x binary as usual, but I have discovered something has changed between kernel 4.1.x - 4.4.16 and vdpau is now usable with nouveau.
So I extracted firmware as recommended on nouveau website, compiled mesa 12.0.1 and I assure you it's working, I even built vdpauinfo to confirm it's unsupported on 4.1 but working on 4.4.16.
Since there is now support for my chip in the kernel, I got rid of the binary installer. You may want to check the list of supported chips on nouveau site.

ljb643 · 08-03-2016, 07:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elcore

...Since there is now support for my chip in the kernel, I got rid of the binary installer. You may want to check the list of supported chips on nouveau site.

With every Slackware release, I try the nouveau driver first, and quickly give up and switch back to the NVIDIA driver. I have had a number of problems with nouveau, but the most serious is that it won't wake up my monitor after it goes into power save mode. I would prefer to use the open-source driver included in Slackware, but I don't like having to turn the monitor off and back on to get it to wake up.