Recently I noticed that my vidio card will I assume decode mpeg 1,2 and 4, H264,VC1 plus divx4 and 5.
Is this facility used by Leap? Is this automatic or do I need to change settings? Or they can’t be used on Leap?
I say assume as I installed an application that lists these in a fashion that strongly suggests that it can decode these directly.
Getting info sometimes seems like getting blood out of a stone.
All I can gather is that VLC will use the gpu automatically on nvidia cards however there may be problems relating to the software version on the card. VLC made the change on 2.2. I can’t see any way of enabling it on my v3. I had to use the beta version to get VLC to work along with an nvidia driver.
I use smplayer as a front end to mpv. Video driver can be default or various others, including vdpau which IINM comes with nvidia’s proprietary driver.
Playing a 4K video in dual monitors (2x 1920 x 1200) with Standard, opengl or vdpau driver uses 1% of CPU. Playing with xv driver uses 100% of one core.
nvidia-settings show an increase in temperature from 46 °C (idle) to 62 °C, with the video card, a GTX 650, switching from power level 0 (324 MHz) to 2 (1070 MHz) during playback. However, when playing with xv driver the top temperature is higher (!) at 67 °C and at power level 2, so the video card runs hotter, although system temps are up by ~8 °C which could explain this increase.
Video is NASA’s Thermonuclear Art - The Sun in 4K (3840 x 2160), bitrate ~ 20 Mbps
I use the Standard setting, never had performance problems, so I assume the frontend is doing it’s job when choosing the driver. I think VLC has similar settings, although I haven’t used it for a long time.
I’m currently using an nvidea passive gt610 it has version 1 vdpau which from the web can be a problem. My monitor is 2560x1440. I don’t think I have ever seen the card temperature much over 55C but video for me is youtube and TV via a usb reciever that might take up circa 25% of the screen.
It’s an old card I’ve had for a long time now so I have decided to upgrade :shame: A passive cooling Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX is on it’s way. 2 reasons. My card sits in a pci3E x16 slot so in some ways I should fit one and dam the cost. Also unlike opensuse 12.3 window edges distort when I move windows about and I’m curious to see if a big increase in power improves that. It’s only the sides, mostly when they are over the desktop rather than over another window and all is ok moving windows vertically. In fact the top and bottom of a window is always ok so guess it’s plasma or something and related to the ability to have wobbly edges. Not having them in my case.
Hmmm. Just for fun I tried with Sintel.2010.4K.mkv, with bitrates about 2.5x (50 Mb/s) of the NASA video. Total CPU use is approx. the same (~30%) for standard, opengl and vdpau.
Something is not kosher here, more testing is in order.
I don’t seem to be able to get the Palit over 40C. I can only get it near that by forcing it to run flat out. Left with the speed set to auto it always under 30C for normal use.
I found a couple of 4K mp4’s that can be downloaded here. One 20mb /sec and the other 50. The faster one does cause it to go to max speed but only 10% utilisation and still well under 40C.
https://archive.org/details/NASA-Ultra-High-Definition
The card doesn’t seem to be decoding on either. If I receive a TV channel via my usb dongle the card does decode it and shows the gpu utilisation at 1%. I can’t receive hd tv.
I can’t really tell if the gpu is decoding 4k on vimeo and youtube once I have set them to full screen. It’s not when they are at the usual size. Chromium comes with the right 4k codec for youtube. >:( My isp wont give me enough bandwidth to stream 4k. Picture’s fine but rebuffers every 30sec or so. The pci bandwidth is hardly being used as well but the nvidia utility show pci gen2 x16 when it’s a pci 3 x16.
Looking around on the web it seems that there are some differences between nvidia’s linux and windows driver. It seems 4k is often encodedd HEVC_MAIN10. Windows does handle that. It seems fixing this for Linux is a feature request.
HEVC_MAIN 153 262144 8192 8192
HEVC_MAIN_10 --- not supported ---
HEVC_MAIN_STILL --- not supported ---
HEVC_MAIN_12 --- not supported ---
HEVC_MAIN_444 --- not supported ---
I have been wondering about getting a larger screen but 4k with circa 100dpi is rather big. Text gets a bit on the small side in places even at 100dpi. Scale a finer pitch up and that can result in not much more screen space than I already have.
I still get jagged sides when I move a kde window around quickly.