When using mplayer with VDPAU, the actual mplayer process might not show up in the most CPU hungry processes listed by top. Thus all benchmarking in this article had to be performed with video being displayed to the screen. One hitch is that you can not use VDPAU decoding with the -vo null option. For benchmarking the GPU decoding the -vc ffh264 was removed from the command line and the mplayer-vdpau wrapper script shown above was used instead of calling mplayer directly. The below command was used for non VDPAU decoding.
#Linux mplayer series#
I’ll reuse the figures for mplayer-single (the normal single threaded mplayer) from the first article of the series as the baseline and compare how much CPU is required when VDPAU is in use. We can of course see what impact using the GPU has on the CPU power necessary for the decode. There is no “gpu-top” command available yet which allows you to see that only 60% of the GPU processing power was needed to decode in real time. For a real time process like video decoding, it is either fast enough or not. Unfortunately, monitoring how much of a hard time a GPU is having performing a task is still a black art. For comparisons on decoding video of real life scenes the two video trailers “The Bourne Ultimatum” (TBU) and “I Am Legend” (IAL) were used from. Because the Elephants Dream is only offered in MPEG4 and not h264, the first 5,000 frames were transcoded in the first article to provide a nice high quality h264 file. You might like to skim over the first article for the details, but in brief there are two freely available 1920×1080 animation files: Big Buck Bunny (BBB) (The 1920×1080 H.264 version) and Elephants Dream (ED). I’ll use the same video files from the first article. Wikipedia contains a nice overview of NVidia cards for those unfamiliar with the cards. The 250 GTS is a nice card for this article as they can be had for around $140 at the time of writing. Note that although this card is a “250” it is the same chip used in the 9800 series.
#Linux mplayer drivers#
Version 185.18.14 of the closed source NVidia drivers were used. Mplayer -vo vdpau -codecs-file ~/.mplayer/nf testing, I’ll use the same Intel Q6600 2.4GHz quad core machine as the first article and an NVidia 250 GTS graphics card. The mplayer-vdpau file is a simple shell script shown below which runs mplayer with a different nf file which enables the use of VDPAU codecs. This way, if GPU decoding of a video file fails for any reason I can quickly revert to using CPU only decoding. I find it convenient to have to MPlayer commands, running “mplayer” runs the non VDPAU version and mplayer-vdpau will use the GPU for decoding.
#Linux mplayer update#
Once MPlayer is configured, compiled, and installed, the main thing you might have to do is update your ~/.mplayer/nf file to tell MPlayer about the VDPAU codecs. If you have the closed source NVidia drivers installed and obtain MPlayer from its subversion repository then VDPAU will be detected during. Recently NVidia added the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix ( VDPAU) to allow the GPU on your graphics card to perform some of the video stream decoding work. This time around we’ll try to use more cores again the hundreds of stream processing units that live on your graphics card.įor this article you will need a recent NVidia graphics card, a GeForce 8 or later and the closed source NVidia graphics drivers. Last time around we took a look at using the ffmpeg-mt multithreaded version of ffmpeg in order to speed up high definition h264 decoding.
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