[SOLVED] VDPAU not working after upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04

[KeithZG]

Is this technically a software problem, or a hardware one? It's on the borderline, I think; I guess I'll put it here. Much of this post is just a re-hash of a similar post I put up on the XBMC forums, since the box in question is mostly used as an XBMC instance.

The title is my problem in a nutshell.

Hardware:
Pentium III 600 mHz, overclocked to 720mHz ohhh yeahhh!
256MB RAM, man that was kickass back in the day
GeForce 8400GS 512MB PCI (not PCI-E, remember, it's a Pentium III)

Software:
(K)Ubuntu 10.04.1 (minimal, no DE installed although there's OpenBox along with much of KDE in terms of apps)
2.6.32-26-generic, i686
XBMC 9.11-lucid3 (from the PPA, I believe), r26018
nvidia-current 195.36.15-0ubuntu2
nvidia-glx-185 195.36.15-0ubuntu2 (kindof a package-misnomer, eh?)
mplayer 2:1.0~rc3+svn20090426-1ubuntu16

23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: Opening video stream: 0 source: 256
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: Creating video codec with codec id: 28
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg::Open() Creating VDPAU(1280x720)
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: vdp_device = 0x00000000 vdp_st = 0x00000001
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728  ERROR: (VDPAU) unable to init VDPAU - vdp_st = 0x1. Falling back.
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg::Open() Failed to get VDPAU device
23:56:11 T:2977164144 M:113225728 NOTICE: (VDPAU) ~CVDPAU

I've tried it with as large of a variety of videos (and codecs therein) as I can, the result is equally unimpressive every time.


I'm totally at a loss. Tried uninstalling all the NVIDIA drivers and re-installing without any sort of PPAs or even updates enabled (hence the version), still nothing. But it all worked perfectly fine last week under Karmic, running XBMC 9.11 too. Yet now VDPAU won't work, sticking me with this CPU running at 720mHz trying desperately to process HD video (and failing quite miserably). Is it something painfully obvious that I'm missing, or is there something strange and wrong with the main Ubuntu repo version of the NVIDIA drivers/libraries, or my install somehow?

It definitely seems to be a system-wide problem, not just XBMC per se.

mplayer's log (using SMPlayer as the frontend out of lazyness) gives

[vdpau]Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.

vdpauinfo, meanwhile, states:

display: :0.0  screen: 0
Error creating VDPAU device: 1

I remain at a complete loss as to what to do.

[KeithZG]

Re: VDPAU not working after upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04

Luckily over at the XBMC forums someone pointed me in the right direction, and I figure it out. I'll post here too in case someone else has a similar problem one day and finds this thread.

In /usr/lib there were a bunch of symlinks which led to older, seemingly orphaned vdpau lib files:

/usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so ->
 /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so.180.37

/usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1 ->
 /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.180.37

/usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so ->
 /usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so.180.37

Sitting there all un-linked-to was libvdpau.so.1.0.0, too. Meanwhile nvidia-current seemed to have installed symlinks for libvdpau_nvidia and libvdpau_trace in /usr/lib/vdpau. So I removed all the ones quoted above, made the /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1 symlink point to /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1.0.0, and voila! Strangely enough this seems to have also fixed XBMC's ability to start its own xsession upon boot, although that seems unlikely (still, I don't remember doing anything else between reboots).