VLC & Nouveau driver: Black screen with sound.

[peter_b]

[PROBLEM]

After switching to Nouveau drivers for an Nvidia graphics card (see below) everything seems to be working fine (including Dualscreen+offset, etc) - but VLC doesn't play any videos:
Black screen. No error message (except in the console. See below). But sound is playing.

Here's info about the graphics card:

Code: Select all

$ lspci | grep -i nvidia 

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF119 [GeForce GT 520] (rev a1)

VLC doesn't show any error message actively in the GUI, but on the console I get:

vdpau_display vout display error: output surface creation failure: A catch-all error, used when no other error code applies.

[SOLUTION]
I'm not sure if this is a solution or a workaround (*):

1) Select OpenGL as output module:

Manually select OpenGL GLX as output module.

2) Disable hardware acceleration:

Disable hardware acceleration for framebuffer.

(*) I haven't had the time to do performance benchmarks.
Before all this, a proprietary Nvidia driver was in use on that system that worked with VLC output module "automatic" and framebuffer hardware acceleration enabled. I'm testing the Noveau driver option, because the proprietary Nvidia (legacy 304) failed after a recent X11/kernel package update and left us with a 800x600px single screen

UPDATE:
It has a performance impact. Made a quick-n-dirty CPU usage comparision between with/without HW acceleration. Back to Nvidia driver: This time nvidia-340 instead of nvidia-304.

• With HW acceleration: ~6% CPU
• Without HW acceleration: ~10-12% CPU

Video tested with is:

h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 7908 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc (default)

[peter_b]

Although audio + video works fine now in VLC, there's a warning/error message in the console in the background:

vdpau_avcodec generic error: decoder profile not supported: 8