Theunis Potgieter Said: I think it is your card that is the problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU shows that is should support up to VP1, however if you look at mythtv's guide: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU it starts only at series 8 and newer.
It seems that your card can then only support xvmc for mpeg2 codec only. :(
Buy a a new 8400 GS (old brand model name but new architecture G98 chip) as indicated here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo
I've tried it in my production machine now, which has this card: 03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400 GS (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Giga-byte Technology Device 3463 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16 Memory at ea000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Memory at e8000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M] I/O ports at b000 [size=128] [virtual] Expansion ROM at eb000000 [disabled] [size=128K] Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [68] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Count=1/1 Enable- Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel <?> Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?> Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information <?> Kernel driver in use: nvidia Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nvidia
And while vdpau does work now, I get little CPU improvement (drops from ~60% under xv to ~45% on vdpau), there's some tearing during action scenes and some image freezing for a few seconds when switching from live TV to recordings which I've had to "kill" on occasion.
Currently I only have SD content to watch and my Sony Bravia 32V only supports up to 1360x668. Any point using vdpau?