[MPlayer-users] VDPAU missing out on AMD

[Mikus Grinbergs]

> your problem seems to be -vf scale,lavc. Have you tried without it?

Peter, thank you for explaining that putting in '-vf' is incompatible 
with vdpau.  Is that documented anywhere ?


I took the '-vf' out, and (after taking out the "threads=6") got to play 
my very first accelerated video:   http://pastebin.com/8ugyQaXK



The reason I had '-vf' in the examples I showed was because every time 
that MPlayer gave me the "incompatible" error message, it also told me:

| Try appending the scale filter to your filter list,
| e.g. -vf spp,scale instead of -vf spp.

What was I supposed to do?



It is hard for me to remember what parameters I specified when I 
originally started my quest for MPlayer video acceleration.  What I do 
remember is that no matter what I tried, the output always became 
"Planar YV12".  I guess that by the time I was frustrated enough to post 
to mplayer-users, I had settled on including the '-vf' in one form or 
another.   But I'm certain that I had experienced equal non-success 
before ever putting it there - so I saw no harm in leaving it in.



> Which error message did you not expect? An error or a warning is
> what I would expect, if I were trying to use an unsupported codec.

I did not expect the message:  "The selected video out device is 
incompatible with this codec."

As I said in my initial post, documentation regarding how to activate 
hardware video acceleration with MPlayer is hard to find.  I did not try 
the various command line parameters one by one.  What I did see was that 
whenever with '-vo vdpau' my action was to put in '-vc ff*vdpau' (for 
every type of file I tried, including for those types which my video 
card hardware does support), MPlayer told me "incompatible".  I did not 
understand that it was the '-vf' that was incompatible.


Please note that in all the output I've shown, the video file I gave to 
MPlayer had H264 content, not hardware-unsupported content.


mikus