VDPAU Video Playback For The Radeon RX Vega On Linux

[TheLexMachine]

Didn't Nvidia already abandoned VDPAU? VAAPI already works with AMD cards, so people should look for that instead.

Yes, VDPAU was terminated without official announcement, at the end of 2015. Nvidia never got it working on the newer cards, so VDPAU is incomplete and can't be used for UHD content because the software has errors that misidentify UHD content and don't trigger the decoder hardware, which means the CPU does the work and the players give error messages saying the content is beyond the specs of the VDPAU decoder. There is a "fork" of that I recently discovered in a VDPAU mirror, but nobody is really working on it. The Big N replaced it with NVDECODE, which is still at early Beta-level and not really implemented in media players. MPV has some rudimentary support for the older version of it called CUVID, but they have not updated the player for NVDECODE. Only the latest FFMPEG build supports it, which is beyond what the distros are using, so it's not accessible unless you use a PPA or get a distro that goes bleeding edge.

[dwagner]

I would really suggest to test with VA-API rather than VDPAU. I can say that at least for my RX 460, VA-API works for more different video formats _and_ requires less CPU time _and_ provides smoother playback.

[agd5f]

I would really suggest to test with VA-API rather than VDPAU. I can say that at least for my RX 460, VA-API works for more different video formats _and_ requires less CPU time _and_ provides smoother playback.

Make sure you were using the native vdpau driver and not the vdpau to vaapi shim driver.

[89c51]

Yes. The same multimedia APIs are supported on all AMD asics.

is there any ETA for vp9 support?? It been promised a long time ago from amd -with a FW update- but no news since.

[aufkrawall]

Nvidia never got it working on the newer cards, so VDPAU is incomplete and can't be used for UHD content because the software has errors that misidentify UHD content and don't trigger the decoder hardware, which means the CPU does the work and the players give error messages saying the content is beyond the specs of the VDPAU decoder.

Of course it does work on new Pascal cards and it also does work with UHD H.264 and HEVC 8 bit content. But no VP9 or HEVC 10 bit, there you have to use buggy cuvid in mpv.

[dwagner]

Make sure you were using the native vdpau driver and not the vdpau to vaapi shim driver.

Hmmm... how could I verify I'm not using that "shim driver"?

When I run "strace -f vdpauinfo | grep -i vdpau" I get the following output:

execve("/usr/bin/vdpauinfo", ["vdpauinfo"], 0x7fffffffe8a8 /* 46 vars */) = 0
open("/usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
read(4, "vdpauinfo\0", 1024)            = 10
open("/etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg", O_RDONLY) = 4
open("/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_radeonsi.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4
[pid  1093] stat("/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_radeonsi.so.1",  <unfinished ...>
Information string: G3DVL VDPAU Driver Shared Library version 1.0

Does this speak for or against the "shim driver" being used?

[M@GOid]

Yes, VDPAU was terminated without official announcement, at the end of 2015. Nvidia never got it working on the newer cards, so VDPAU is incomplete and can't be used for UHD content because the software has errors that misidentify UHD content and don't trigger the decoder hardware, which means the CPU does the work and the players give error messages saying the content is beyond the specs of the VDPAU decoder. There is a "fork" of that I recently discovered in a VDPAU mirror, but nobody is really working on it. The Big N replaced it with NVDECODE, which is still at early Beta-level and not really implemented in media players. MPV has some rudimentary support for the older version of it called CUVID, but they have not updated the player for NVDECODE. Only the latest FFMPEG build supports it, which is beyond what the distros are using, so it's not accessible unless you use a PPA or get a distro that goes bleeding edge.

So the Geforce 10xx series do not have video decode acceleration on Linux? Uau.

[agd5f]

Does this speak for or against the "shim driver" being used?

Looks like you are ok. The "shim driver" is for asics like intel that do not support vdpau natively, so it converts vdpau into vaapi.

[Nille_kungen]

AMD's gallium based vaapi implementation lacks the necessary egl interop.

Maybe we should put more hope into the OMX tizonia port.
https://singhcodes.wordpress.com/201...-and-eglimage/
https://singhcodes.wordpress.com/201...-phase-starts/

[dwagner]

Looks like you are ok. The "shim driver" is for asics like intel that do not support vdpau natively, so it converts vdpau into vaapi.

Ok, thanks for the confirmation.

BTW: Amongst the many interesting commit messages in your amd-staging-drm-next tree (which I currently run to enjoy HDMI 2 support) I spotted one regarding HDR10 signaling: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/...28243e6f41b64a

Is it way too early to ask for this, or is there already preliminary support for emitting an HDR signal via HDMI? If so, how would one configure the X11 server to make use of it?