VDPAU 9400GT MPEG2 artifacts

[rdriscoll]

Thanks Stephen for the quick response (this is why we all buy nvidia products).

BTW: I noticed there were complaints about the powermiser being too aggressive on some GPU's and causing artifacts. I will try disabling it and see if anything improves.

Originally Posted by Stephen Warren

Interesting. I tracked down an nForce 630a and a similar GPU and managed to reproduce the problem with the "curious george" clip. I'll file a bug and see if we can find out what's going wrong.

[jshank]

Count me in for an ASRock ALiveNF7G-FullHD R3.0 AM2+/AM2 Motherboard and a nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600 GT] with blocking and pixelation playing back MPEG2 streams using VDPAU. I use MythTV and an HDHomeRun that natively stores recordings in MPEG2 and they are all blocky. When I play H.264, it's perfect. It uses the NVIDIA GeForce 7050 chipset. I am subscribing to the thread to watch for a solution. Please let me know if I can provide any debug information or test and fixes. Thanks.

[tuxfan9800gt]

Another big thank you to Stephen for taking the time and effort to reproduce what looks like a very hardware specific issue.

I'm another M2N68-VM owner who has been fighting with these "Block Artifacts" during MythTV VDPAU playback of MPEG2 TV recordings. As others have said, Mplayer plays perfectly via VDPAU so I'd originally concentrated on MythTV settings to try and resolve the issue. After trying every MythTV tweak I could think of, I assumed that my 8400GT may have been under powered for what I was asking (High Quality VDPAU @1920x1080). Last week I invested in a new 9800GT with 1GB RAM and was horrified to find that the Artifacts survived the upgrade.

I will watch with great interest to see how Stephen gets on with the bug that's been filed and offer my time (and excess NVidia hardware) if I can help with any testing that needs to be done along the way.

Originally Posted by Stephen Warren

Interesting. I tracked down an nForce 630a and a similar GPU and managed to reproduce the problem with the "curious george" clip. I'll file a bug and see if we can find out what's going wrong.

[Blammo]

Throw another "Me too" into this thread. I opened a TRAC ticket (http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/7571)

- MCP67 Motherboard (AN-M2HD 7050PV)
- NV 9600GSO
- Fedora 12 64-bit fresh install
- NV 190.50 from Freshrpms
- mythTV from ATRPMS

MPEG2 source (HD Home Run)

VDPAU ON: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/attachmen...-glitter-1.jpg
VDPAU OFF: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/attachmen...-glitter-1.jpg

mplayer is fine with VDPAU, MythTV is not.

Love to hear about how to fix it, OTHER than replacing the motherboard.......

[Stephen Warren]

I believe we've found something at least related to this problem. We'd like some help testing this.

To test:

1) Install 32-bit driver 195.36.03. MUST use a 32-bit application. MUST use driver version 195.36.03. MUST use Linux.

2) Download http://avon.wwwdotorg.org/downloads/...a.so.195.36.03

3) Copy the downloaded file over the top of existing /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.195.36.03 (if that file does not exist, check /usr/lib32/vdpau too).

4) If you already had 195.36.03 installed, make sure you restart any applications that use VDPAU.

Then, test playback of MPEG-2. Is the problem still present?

Finally: Even if the problems are fixed for you, note that the change in the downloaded libvdpau_nvidia isn't necessarily a complete solution, and nor is it yet included in any future driver. It's simply a data point to help us confirm our understanding.

Thanks.

cehoyos, out of curiosity, does this fix the corruption you have when also capturing using DVB? I assume that's MPEG-2 not H.264?

[tuxfan9800gt]

Hi Stephen,

My 32bit FC11 setup matches your testing requirements.
I'll get this tested tonight after work and pass on the results.

[plaengert]

Hi Stephen,

This fix appears to solve the issue for me. I've tested numerous recordings that had consistently displayed these artifacts, and no problems at all are visible now.

Thanks for your help in getting this resolved.

[cehoyos]

Originally Posted by Stephen Warren

cehoyos, out of curiosity, does this fix the corruption you have when also capturing using DVB? I assume that's MPEG-2 not H.264?

I cannot currently test, but the pre-emptions I see on some motherboards (KT333 based) when using a DVB card are not hardware-decoder related: I can trigger them by just using mplayer -vo vdpau (with software decoding) - but they do also happen with -vc ffh264vdpau and -vc ffmpeg12vdpau.

Carl Eugen

[tuxfan9800gt]

The term "legends" just doesn't seem to cut it!

Applied the fix as per Stephen's post and for the first time ever I have playback of MythTV SD & HD content via VDPAU with no sign of the "Block Artifacts".

Well done guys and thanks again.

[Blammo]

Everything I run is 64-bit, so I don't have any way to test this yet.. However, thank you on behalf of those whom it IS working for, and I look forward to hearing about patch progression into 64-bit. Can you comment more on the source of the problem. It's VERY odd that it affected ONLY MPEG2 and even affected the PCI-E card when the motherboard video was disabled in the bios?

(of course, this comes right after I tore apart the machine in question, removing the 9600GSO, and running only on the motherboard video, and changing all the config back to CPU++)

[Stephen Warren]

It would be really helpful if everyone who's having this issue could attach an "nvidia bug report" here. I have reports from gator123 and bts1000 already.

Also, if you could post the output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo", that would help too.

Thanks.

[rdriscoll]

I am running 64bit Mythbuntu but I would like to help - let me know if I can run something for you.

Originally Posted by Stephen Warren

It would be really helpful if everyone who's having this issue could attach an "nvidia bug report" here. I have reports from gator123 and bts1000 already.

Also, if you could post the output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo", that would help too.

Thanks.