HOWTO: VLC + VAAPI in Maverick

[AdrianVeidt]

I thought I would go over some of the basics. In a nutshell, most graphics chips made in the past couple of years now have the ability to accelerate h.264 and wmv3 at the very least through va-api and VLC in Maverick.

Now, when you ask for VLC to be installed, va-api, which is called "libva", will be installed with it. That library then needs one of three possible video drivers to be present to work. Two of the three driver packages are already in Maverick too. They are vdpau-va-driver (for Nvidia chips) and i965-va-driver (for Intel chips). The third package, for ATI/AMD chips, is called xvba-video. You will have to go here:
http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbe...ne/xvba-video/
grab the latest package for your arch. Download and double-click it and it will offer to install itself.

Now, to be clear, the proprietary nvidia and AMD drivers must be activated and in use for this to work on those platforms. The open-source drivers do not support video acceleration on Nvidia/AMD at this point in time. Only very new Intel hardware is supported, from the GMA4500 onwards.

So to summarize -- If you have an nvidia graphics platform:

$sudo apt-get install vlc vdpau-va-driver

VLC must be told to use va-api. Open VLC, click Tools>Preferences>Video, and check "Accelerated Video Output". Furthermore, video filters/effects and deinterlacing will be done by the CPU, so turn these off for maximum effect.

[mc4man]

Tools>Preferences>Video, and check "Accelerated Video Output"

That should be on vaapi or not, for vaapi it's enabled in 'Input and Codecs' - 'Use GPU acceleration'

(I'd suggest d. checking in htop if it is providing any benefit, certainly possible w/ some sources & hardware compo's that cpu use will increase w/ vaapi

[insaini]

im having issues for some reason.. vlc is seg faulting..

i installed vainfo

getting this

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
Segmentation fault

maverick 64bit
nvidia 8600 GTS

[insaini]

seems like libva in the xorg edgers ppa isnt updated yet.. had to purge the ppa.. works now

[sizeak]

I keep getting issues related to libva-glx being missing but I can't for the life of me find it anywhere. It doesn't seem to be in the repo when I apt-cache search it. Any ideas?

[....]

I keep getting issues related to libva-glx being missing but I can't for the life of me find it anywhere. It doesn't seem to be in the repo when I apt-cache search it. Any ideas?

It's a little tougher with ATI/XvBA. You have to extract a couple files (libva-glx) out of the ATI Catalyst installer and use the libva from splitted-desktop. Even then, it's not perfect.

[bsmith1051]

Two of the three driver packages are already in Maverick too. They are vdpau-va-driver (for Nvidia chips) and i965-va-driver (for Intel chips). The third package, for ATI/AMD chips, is called xvba-video. You will have to go here:
http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbe...ne/xvba-video/

Thank you! This is exactly the information I needed. Now, off to try it...

UPDATE: it doesn't work. When I run 'vainfo' it reports,

libva: libva version 0.31.0
Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
libva: va_getDriverName() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

Any suggestions? This is on Ubuntu 10.10 (AMD64) with an ATI 4200 and the latest Catalyst 10.10 (as provided automatically by the Ubuntu 'Hardware Drivers' installer)