VDPAU does not work in libav on Utopic

[Michael Marley]

After upgrading a Kubuntu Trusty x86_64 system to Utopic, VDPAU support has stopped working in all applications that use libav. In mplayer2, it prints "Cannot find codec 'h264_vdpau' in libavcodec..." and in VLC I get "[00007f9090000958] vdpau_avcodec generic error: decoder profile not supported: 6".

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

This seems to be due to an API change in libav. They dropped the old API for using VDPAU decoding, which broke every application that uses VDPAU through libav. https://libav.org/releases/libav-10.5.release

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

"[00007f9090000958] vdpau_avcodec generic error: decoder profile not supported: 6" means that:

1) your libavcodec installation does support VDPAU properly, and
2 ) your VDPAU driver does not support H.264 decoding at all (or reports incorrect capabilities).

Closing as invalid.

[zarquon42 (zarquon42)]

In vlc and kaffeine, I can see an increase in video core clock and decoder clock, accompanied by a decrease in cpu usage (only 15%) as opposed to mplayer (cpu usage = 65%).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Geert Hedde Bosman (gbosman-z)]

If i do 'mpv -v -vo vdpau --vd=ffh264vdpau,ffvc1vdpau, movie.m2ts' , i get a high cpu usage. So indeed hardware acceleration does not work. However, if i use 'mpv -v -vo vdpau --hwdec=vdpau movie.mt2s' , i get a nice low cpu usage. So mpv is not affected as long as one uses the new way of choosing hardware acceleration. I believe mplayer2 is no longer in active development. The website 'mplayer2.org' is dead. So chances are small this (i.e. the API changes in libav) will ever be repaired in mplayer2.

[Pablo J. E. Rodriguez (rodablo)]

running:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -aspect 16:9 http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/twit/live/high

I get audio but no video and this message:

Forced video codec: ffh264vdpau
Cannot find codec 'h264_vdpau' in libavcodec...
Video decoder init failed for codecs.conf entry "ffh264vdpau".

this command line works fine before I update from thrusty to utopic.

[Dale Taylor (dtaylor37)]

Can confirm that this is affecting VLC as well.

[Sebastian Ramacher (s-ramacher)]

Please provide a log of vlc -vvv.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) reached end of standard support in April 2019:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

If you would like to continue with free support then please update to a
newer Ubuntu version and tell us if the problem still occurs.

If you would like to continue with Ubuntu 14.04 then there is a paid
support option detailed at https://www.ubuntu.com/esm

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 14.10 (utopic) reached end-of-life on July 23, 2015.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in and change the bug status to Confirmed.