vdpau seems to be broken in Precise under Unity 3d. CPU usage ranges around 50-70% for 1080p movies while same movies utilizes around 5-10% in Natty with vdpau enabled (under Unity3d) The card is Nvidia G105m.
It doesn't seem to be a Nvidia driver problem because in gnome-shell everything works as expected and I have tried different versions of Nvidia drivers (295.20, 295.33, 295.40 and the latest 302.XX from xorg-edgers) The results are all the same, works in Gnome Shell but not in Unity 3d.
Disabling syn to vbank works if movie is not in full screen mode, but it doesn't work for full screen.
I have searched around and haven't found much info. I am wondering if others are experiencing the same problem and if there are some known work around that I have missed. Unity 3d is otherwise very nice in Precise, but this is a show stopping issue for me (literally).
Thanks.
I have filed a bug here https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/993397
That sort of CPU usage suggests that it's not using VDPAU at all. Even on a rubbish Atom+ION PC I'm only seeing 0.1-0.2 loads when playing 1080p. I suggest you double-check to make sure VDPAU is running.
This can fairly quickly be done with
mplayer. Just runmplayer video.mp4(making sure it's a codec that can be decoded by VDPAU) and you should see something like this in the output:If you're not, check
libvdpau1is installed.From what i know, there are 2-3 issues for some nvidia graphics:
Here's a post about it
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/09/20/make-compiz-run-smoothly-and-without-tearing/
** In the article it says to select sync to vblank: try to see if enabling / disabling has an effect.
Hope this helps someone.