sunshine's questions

Steam In-Home streaming suddenly started refusing to use hardware decoding. Have been using this for some time without issue. The client PC is too weak for software decoding.

Running Steam Client on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit with nvidia-384 drivers, and a GT710.

Have tried reinstalling steam and nvidia drivers to no avail. Keeps defaulting back to software decoding.

Started steam from a shell, and noticed this in the output when streaming a game:

ffmpeg verbose: Opened VA display via X11 display :0.
libva info: VA-API version 0.39.0`
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
ffmpeg error: Failed to initialise VAAPI connection: -1 (unknown libva error).
CVAAPIAccel: av_hwdevice_ctx_create() failed
libavcodec software decoding with 2 threads

Sure enough, there is no nvidia_drv_video.so present. At a complete loss here.

On Ubuntu server 16.04, with only X installed and no window manager, I can still launch Kodi without the --standalone switch. For example from a local console:

xinit kodi -- vtx

This leads me to ask: what is the difference between "kodi" and "kodi --standalone" if I can still launch kodi without calling the "kodi-standalone" or "--standalone" switch?

I understand kodi is for launching with a window manager, and kodi-standalone is a script that launches kodi with the --standalone switch.

My question is why, since I have with no WM installed, do both kodi and kodi-standalone (or kodi --standalone) launch just fine?