VDPAU fglrx Debian jessie

kaz2100 · 05-15-2014, 05:51 AM

Hya

System
Debian jessie amd64 with fglrx.

Situation

Code:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution
Install libvdpau-va-gl1, instead of libvdpau1

cheers

It must be somewhere I am sure, but I could not find this info with web search.

gradinaruvasile · 05-16-2014, 01:19 PM

Catalyst(fglrx) DOES NOT, CANNOT and most likely WILL NOT use VDPAU at all.

fglrx has hardware decoding implemented via XVBA which isnt used by mainstream players (it was implemented in xbmc a while ago where it was working very well performance-wise at least, but they dropped it because the catalyst devs werent responsive and the OSS radeon team implemented VDPAU for the same hardware).
The hardware decoding in fglrx used in vlc is VAAPI (Intel's decoding method that permits other backends too) with XVBA backend - but its nowhere as fast or stable as xvba used directly.

So using fglrx in practice you cannot use the hardware decoding effectively only as a slow and buggy backend to VAAPI (unless you dig up the old and abandoned xbmc branch and compile it).

On the other hand VDPAU is used in the open source radeon driver for the 5xxx and newer cards (some 4xxx models work with it too). The advantage is that it is supported by mainstream video players directly - mplayer (and by extension smplayer/umplayer/etc), mpv, xbmc, vlc(2.1+ with new libav) support it. It works very well with very low CPU usage.

kaz2100 · 05-19-2014, 03:36 AM

Hya

Thanks, initially I thought so.

But the fact is as post #1. I guess I need to investigate a bit further.

cheers

gradinaruvasile · 05-19-2014, 08:05 AM

libvdpau-va-gl1 isnt really using VDPAU hardware decoding.

Code:

Description: VDPAU driver with OpenGL/VAAPI backend
 Many applications can use VDPAU to accelerate portions of the video decoding
 process and video post-processing to the GPU video hardware. Unfortunately,
 there is no such library for many graphic chipsets. Some applications also
 support VA-API but many of them, including Adobe Flash Player, don't. 
 
 This library proposes a generic VDPAU library. It uses OpenGL under the hood to
 accelerate drawing and scaling and VA-API (if available) to accelerate video
 decoding.

TobiSGD · 05-19-2014, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gradinaruvasile

On the other hand VDPAU is used in the open source radeon driver for the 5xxx and newer cards (some 4xxx models work with it too).

To be more precise: VDPAU on radeon works for any card >=HD4xxx, except RS780/880 (Radeon HD3200/4200/4250) and RV790 (Radeon HD4860/4890).

kaz2100 · 05-19-2014, 10:23 PM

Hya

When I got libvdpau.nvidia missing message, I did not think much. Why nv library on ATI penguin?

Two packages, ffmpeg and mplayer depend on libvdpau. I guess, probably, these issues are related to this confusion. It may not be easy to straighten out dependency tree.

cheers

Maybe next time, I will go away from ATI board.

kaz2100 · 05-20-2014, 07:06 PM

Correction

The message, "Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" is back again.

Post #1 is incorrect!

apoplogy

Shadow_7 · 05-20-2014, 08:36 PM

As named the library exists in nvidia-vdpau-driver package according to apt-file.

$ apt-file find libvdpau_nvidia.so

And according to apt-cache it has a kernel module component provided by the nvidia-kernel-dkms or nvidia-kernel-source packages.

$ apt-cache show nvidia-vdpau-driver

But it doesn't make much sense to use a kernel module that provides openGL support for nvidia chipsets on an amd/ati graphics card.

$ apt-cache show nvidia-kernel-dkms

So the issue is more likely to be that the application was compiled against nvidia dependencies, than that it's reporting that the dependency was not met. I get this error from iceweasel / oracles java, but it doesn't seem to have any ill effects. I can still play java games in browser with OpenGL support on an amd/ati HD4550. Although dwb seems to be more responsive for those things on this 1.9GHz dual core circa '07-ish.

gradinaruvasile · 05-21-2014, 01:37 AM

@kaz2100:

Quote:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Back to the root issue of this post, in what situation does that appear exactly and what issues does it cause?

kaz2100 · 05-21-2014, 10:29 PM

Hya

System
Penguin spec is here. Debian jessie

Situatiion
Every once in a while, my penguin complains as post #1 or #8.

Mistake
Post #1 is incorrect.

Troubleshooting
Two packages, ffmpeg and mplayer depends on libvdpau. These two packages are from deb-multimeida.

Debian document, libvdpau-doc says something like libvdpau_ati or libvdpau_intel also exists.

Next step
I need to figure out.

cheers

gradinaruvasile · 05-22-2014, 04:05 AM

Quote:

Every once in a while, my penguin complains as post #1 or #8.

I asked what real PROBLEMS does it cause (such as program crashing, unable to view movies etc). If you look at many programs terminal output, they "complain" about many things and have no relevance at all for the end user. Programs such as mplayer have to be compiled against libvdpau since they use that library WHEN THE DRIVER SUPPORTS IT (dont like that error message, recompile mplayer without vdpau).
fglrx(Catalyst) DOES NOT support and cannot be made to support VDPAU. Period.

You can modify the VDPAU_DRIVER variable to anything, for example running 'VDPAU_DRIVER=r600 mplayer moviename' (the OSS driver's VDPAU settings) and you will get

Code:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_r600.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

because you dont have that file (which is part of MESA, not nvidia) since you use fglrx. "nvidia" is the default value since nvidia made VDPAU. The "libvdpau_nvidia.so" file exists only if the nvidia driver is installed. Mplayer searches for the file in question to assess the driver capabilities. The method is to find and open the libvdpau_ file. Doesnt find, it, it prints a message. Thats all.

Also, if you set vdpau as either decode backend or presentation from mplayer os smplayer, it will surely wont work (no video) since you use fglrx that cannot use VDPAU. The list presented by mplayer is about what IT can do (the options that are compiled in it), not about what YOUR DRIVER can do. If it autodetects your drivers capabilities and you dont have VDPAU capable driver, you will probably get that error.
So: do not try to force VDPAU with mplayer/smplayer (use software decoding and opengl or xv output) and just ignore "errors" like this until they dont prevent you from using the program in question.

For anyone who reads this thread:

fglrx(Catalyst) DOES NOT support VDPAU hardware decoding which is actually used in players. You cannot make it to support VDPAU no matter what packages you install because the way the driver works (it has other method, named xvba to provide proper hardware acceleration, but that is NOT supported directly by any mainstream video players).

PS deb-multimedia isnt an official repo and has some stuff in it (codecs, ffmpeg) etc that are not in the official repos (which btw do provide mplayer too, only compiled against libav). Use with caution, if you decide to not use it after you installed stuff from it, you will have a dependency mess.

gradinaruvasile · 05-22-2014, 04:16 AM

I asked what real PROBLEMS does it cause (such as program crashing, unable to view movies etc). If you look at many programs terminal output, they "complain" about many things and have no relevance at all for the end user. Programs such as mplayer have to be compiled against libvdpau since they use that library WHEN THE DRIVER SUPPORTS IT (dont like that error message, recompile mplayer without vdpau).
fglrx(Catalyst) DOES NOT support and cannot be made to support VDPAU. Period.

You can modify the VDPAU_DRIVER variable to anything, for example running 'VDPAU_DRIVER=r600 mplayer moviename' (the OSS driver's VDPAU settings) and you will get

Code:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_r600.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

because you dont have that file (which is part of MESA, not nvidia) since you use fglrx. "nvidia" is the default value since nvidia made VDPAU. The "libvdpau_nvidia.so" file exists only if the nvidia driver is installed. Mplayer searches for the file in question to assess the driver capabilities. The method is to find and open the libvdpau_ file. Doesnt find, it, it prints a message. Thats all.

Also, if you set vdpau as either decode backend or presentation from mplayer os smplayer, it will surely wont work (no video) since you use fglrx that cannot use VDPAU. The list presented by mplayer is about what IT can do (the options that are compiled in it), not about what YOUR DRIVER can do. If it autodetects your drivers capabilities and you dont have VDPAU capable driver, you will probably get that error.
So: do not try to force VDPAU with mplayer/smplayer (use software decoding and opengl or xv output) and just ignore "errors" like this until they dont prevent you from using the program in question.

For anyone who reads this thread:

fglrx(Catalyst) DOES NOT support VDPAU hardware decoding which is actually used in players. You cannot make it to support VDPAU no matter what packages you install because the way the driver works (it has other method, named xvba to provide proper hardware acceleration, but that is NOT supported directly by any mainstream video players).

PS deb-multimedia isnt an official repo and has some stuff in it (codecs, ffmpeg) etc that are not in the official repos (which btw do provide mplayer too, only compiled against libav). Use with caution, if you decide to not use it after you installed stuff from it, you will have a dependency mess.

PS2 For that penguin of yours, you probably need proper hw decoding, since the cpu is very weak. Playing anything HD on it i imagine is a pain. Now the only way is the open source OSS driver, which may work currently in jessie (dont know since i compile the latest driver for a long time).

kaz2100 · 05-24-2014, 06:38 AM

Hya

I should have investigated more before I came here. Still I have not read everything yet.

Situation I had.

Iceweasel complained "missing vdpau". I do not think mplayer was kicked in. My guess was banner ad, maybe something else is to blame.

I found this thread. I was not sure whether or not my penguin was slow. Several motion pics from Youtube looked good.

Document file (Debian repo) reads like

Quote:

Back-end driver files. These files are located in a system-defined library path, which is configurable at compile time but is typically /usr/lib/vdpau. Use pkg-config --variable=moduledir vdpau to locate the driver install path.
$moduledir/libvdpau_%s.so.1 For example:
/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.1
/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_intel.so.1
/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_ati.so.1

However, I did not find last two libraries.

I was playing around for a while and I thought I did right (#1), which turned out to be incorrect.

I have not figured out how iceweasel used vdpau. My incorrect guess was that fglrx was backend for vdpau.

Thanks for attention.

cheers

gradinaruvasile · 05-24-2014, 09:09 AM

Iceweasel can not use VDPAU (not even the external gstreamer used for h264 decoding cannot use VDPAU).
What can, though, is Adobe Flash Player if its configured correctly in the /etc/adobe/mms.cfg. But from my experience, while this works on certain sites like youtube, it causes plugin crashes on other sites so its pretty useless feature (because of the faulty implementation) in the long run.

Of course, the above doesnt apply for drivers that cannot use VDPAU like fglrx.