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I recently bought a Nvidia GT 440, and installed the proprietary nvidia-experimental-310 driver.

Every player seems to be working alright with VDPAU, except Mplayer frontends like SMPlayer.

Any ideas on why this is happening?

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If it actually works with mplayer:

mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau somefile.mkv

in SMPlayer, it should be as simple as setting it to use vdpau in Options / Preferences / General / Video. Set the Output driver vdpau (it should be there in the drop-down list in a recent enough version, without the need to use the User defined setting).

How did you install the proprietary drivers and are you sure the required libraries for vdpau are installed?

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Didn't work with mplayer, gave me this output: pastebin.com/0NRhFV43 I installed via apt-get install nvidia-experimental-310. Which are the libs required for vdpau? I'm pretty sure they're installed, because VLC works fine with vdpau. –  Cliff Miller Feb 23 '13 at 21:48
If I take the "-vc ffh264vdpau" part of the command, it works fine. –  Cliff Miller Feb 23 '13 at 22:10
@GabrielHuwe Have you also monitored CPU usage (should be very low, like 0-10 %) while VLC is playing a video to be sure, that it is really working? I would also try installing nvidia-current drivers from ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates instead of the experimental ones. If you remove the -vc, then it won't use vdpau properly anyway. –  pileofrocks Feb 23 '13 at 22:15
no, it uses 15%~30%. I am compiling a newer version of mplayer2 right now, just to test. –  Cliff Miller Feb 23 '13 at 22:22
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