Mysterious heavy slowdown when playing 1080p videos through VDPAU

MadCatX · 11-05-11, 07:29 AM

I first spotted this issue with 285.x series drivers though I don't play 1080p all that much so it could've been there for a longer time.
Whenever I play a 1080p video accelerated though VDPAU, the playback is very slow, the whole system slows down to a crawl, even the mouse cursor lags in X. It doesn't matter which player I use, I can reproduce this with mplayer, flashplugin, VLC. To resolve the situation I have to open nvidia-settings while the video is playing and set PowerMizer to "maximum performance". Everything gets up to speed almost immediately and I can switch the PowerMizer back to "adaptive" again. The card then clocks down to power level 2 and stays there. When the player is closed and opened again, I have to repeat this procedure.
When VDPAU is not used to accelerate decoding, I don't have this problem. There's also nothing wrong with 720p videos. The problem is still present in 290.06.

MadCatX · 11-06-11, 01:08 PM

A bit of an update here. I tried to launch mplayer from console using the same command it's being passed by SMPlayer and strip it down to see if I can find what causes the slowdown. The original command looks like this

Code:

/usr/bin/mplayer -noquiet -nofs -nomouseinput -vc ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau, -lavdopts threads=3 -sub-fuzziness 1 -identify -slave -vo vdpau:denoise=1,hqscaling=4 -ao alsa -nokeepaspect -framedrop -hardframedrop -nodr -nodouble -input nodefault-bindings:conf=/dev/null -stop-xscreensaver -wid 121634965 -monitorpixelaspect 1 -ass -embeddedfonts -ass-line-spacing 0 -ass-font-scale 1 -ass-styles /home/madcat/.config/smplayer/styles.ass -fontconfig -font DejaVu LGC Sans -subfont-autoscale 0 -subfont-osd-scale 20 -subfont-text-scale 20 -subcp enca:cs:UTF-8 -vid 0 -aid 0 -subpos 100 -volume 32 -cache 4096 -ss 1443 -osdlevel 0 -noslices -channels 2 -af scaletempo -softvol -softvol-max 250 -cache-min 25 -lavdopts threads=3 /home/madcat/Hvězdné války - Epizoda III - Pomsta Sithů ( Revenge of the Sith - 2005 ).mkv

When I change "ffh264vdpau" to "ffh264", everything is OK so I guess there's an issue with accelerated h264 decoding, it would also explain why Adobe Flashplayer is affected.

MadCatX · 11-06-11, 01:23 PM

Attached VDPAU debug files. First one is an ordinary playback, second one is where I toggled the PowerMizer a few seconds after the playback started, both with "-vc ffh264vdpau".

MadCatX · 11-06-11, 02:29 PM

Another update. All videos encoded with x264 seem to be causing the problem, not just the 1080p ones but the slowdown is most noticeable with them.

11-06-11, 02:29 PM	#4
MadCatX Registered User Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 29	Re: Mysterious heavy slowdown when playing 1080p videos through VDPAU Another update. All videos encoded with x264 seem to be causing the problem, not just the 1080p ones but the slowdown is most noticeable with them.