Hi there!
I’m searching hard on the forums, to find a solution to the problem stated in the topic. I’ve also read a few blog posts about the subject, but no success yet.
I’ve installed my NVIDIA driver through the “official” way, also referred to as the “hard way” here on openSUSE. Of course there was nothing hard in it, I’m running with the latest 290.10 driver right now. I did not use the “one-click” install, because I like it better this way. My card is capable of doing VDPAU output (it worked in 11.4, but I used the one-click method back then).
When choosing VDPAU as video output in any mediaplayers, I get an error message stating that it can’t play via this output (or a plain green screen, e.g. in VLC with sound only). I can play movies perfectly with the default output.
Can you help me a little on how to enable VDPAU? I have no idea so far, but I really need that hardware acceleration it used to give so good. ^^
Thank you,
groovnout
There are various levels of support for VDPAU, depending on your card chipset. For example, in mine (9800 GT) vdpau only plays x264 content, not other encoding formats.
Also there’s a fallback setting I had to specify in mplayer conf file to avoid a playback error. See here. Perhaps it will help.
Also on the thread above oldcpu gave an excellent explanation of the different support levels.
Just a basic question: I have the vdpau-video package installed from packman. Do you?
Thanks for your suggestions! I didn’t have that package installed, now I do. 
I don’t know if there is a difference, probably not, at least I can’t see any.
With full screen play (desktop effects turned off) an 1080p movie has around 10-20% CPU usage (40-50% running in window with desktop effects turned on). So vdpau is working I guess.
Probably I’m having some kind of an encoding format related problem, as you stated in your first response. This happens with only one specific, (new) 1080p movie. I will also try working with the mplayer config file when I have some time, hope it will solve the problem. It’s just that I never had problems with playback of hd movies… strange.
Will get back with my findings.
Thank you for your help!
groovnout
Okay, I found out that VDPAU doesn’t support 10bit encoded movies. This is the reason I couldn’t play the one I mentioned before. However, it plays nice if I choose a different output driver (e.g. xv in smplayer).
All the other hd movies I tried (non10-bit) worked flawlessly (/w VDPAU). ^^