NVIDIA

From Indie IT Wiki

NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, which generates interactive graphics on workstations.

Display Driver Uninstaller

Third party add to help add a fresh install of graphics card drivers:

http://www.wagnardsoft.com/

HOWTO: Link To Latest Drivers

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/361.28/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-361.28.run

HOWTO: List Latest Drivers In Terminal

To manually see what is available, sorted by version number...

lynx -useragent=Chrome -dump "http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-amd64-display-archive.html" 2>/dev/null |egrep --color=never 'Version:|Release Date:' |head -n6 |sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' |tr '\n' ' ' |sed -e 's/ Version/\nVersion/g' |sort -r
Version: 343.22 Release Date: September 18, 2014 
Version: 340.46 Release Date: September 30, 2014
Version: 331.104 Release Date: October 8, 2014

To automatically see what is available, sorted by version number...

crontab -e
@weekly lynx -useragent=Chrome -dump "http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-amd64-display-archive.html" 2>/dev/null |egrep --color=never 'Version:|Release Date:' |head -n6 |sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' |tr '\n' ' ' |sed -e 's/ Version/\nVersion/g' |sort -r

HOWTO: Install Latest Drivers Manually

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual

 837  2013-09-04 22:26:47 sudo aptitude search nvidia |grep '^i'
 838  2013-09-04 22:27:24 sudo aptitude remove nvidia-319-updates nvidia-experimental-310 nvidia-settings-319-updates
 839  2013-09-04 22:28:53 sudo nano /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common
 845  2013-09-04 22:32:11 sudo cp -av /etc/X11/xorg.conf* /root/
 847  2013-09-04 22:32:57 sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 848  2013-09-04 22:39:03 sudo chmod +x ~/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-319.49.run
 851  2013-09-04 23:00:22 dmesg |grep -i nvidia
 855  2013-09-04 23:05:01 sudo nano /etc/modules
 856  2013-09-04 23:05:21 sudo lsmod |sort
 857  2013-09-04 23:02:28 sudo service lightdm stop
 858  2013-09-04 23:02:37 sudo service lightdm start
 863  2013-09-04 23:05:57 sudo nano /etc/modules
 869  2013-09-04 23:09:13 sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
 874  2013-09-04 23:15:35 sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
 875  2013-09-04 23:16:31 sudo update-alternatives --config x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf
 876  2013-09-04 23:16:51 sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
 877  2013-09-04 23:18:15 sudo nvidia-xconfig
 879  2013-09-04 23:20:20 sudo reboot
 880  2013-09-04 23:23:32 dmesg |grep -i nvidia
 883  2013-09-04 23:24:58 sudo cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 884  2013-09-04 23:25:06 sudo cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
 885  2013-09-04 23:25:14 sudo cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
 886  2013-09-04 23:29:59 glxinfo
 887  2013-09-04 23:30:20 glxgears

Install Nvidia Experimental 310 Drivers

January 2013: the current Ubuntu driver 304 is dated August 2012.

The list of 5 installed packages is...

nvidia-common
nvidia-current
nvidia-current-updates
nvidia-settings
nvidia-settings-updates

To install the latest and greatest 310 driver from November, follow these commands...

sudo apt-get remove nvidia*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-experimental-310
sudo reboot

This will install just 2 packages...

nvidia-experimental-310
nvidia-settings-experimental-310 

The difference is very nice indeed. :-)

Fix Tearing and Stuttering

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#Tearing.2FStuttering

could not write bytes: Broken pipe

This appears to be an NVIDIA issue and prevents booting in to a graphical environment:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates

The above sould repair/replace the drivers, however if your reboot and still have go GUI and/or a password entry loop:

sudo mv .Xauthority .XauthorityOld
sudo reboot

List Of Latest Unix Drivers

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

PureVideo

Nvidia PureVideo is a hardware feature designed to offload video decoding processes and video post-processing from a computer's CPU hardware to NVIDIA's GPU hardware series GeForce 6, GeForce 7, GeForce 8, GeForce 9, GeForce 200, GeForce 400, GeForce 500 ; GeForce M series (formerly known as GeForce Go); and Nvidia Quadro series. PureVideo is designed to work with media playback software. NVIDIA's device drivers for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are PureVideo-enabled; with the appropriate (PureVideo-enabled) application software, the NVIDIA driver will automatically use whatever hardware-acceleration is available on the NVIDIA display-adapter.

All software HD DVD/Blu-ray players, as well as most software DVD players, are PureVideo-enabled. Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center also supports NVIDIA's PureVideo technology. NVIDIA also sells its own PureVideo decoder software (which is a source of confusion, as NVIDIA's decoder is not required and not used by third-party players), which serves as a DVD player with advanced post-processing capabilities. The degree of PureVideo's capabilities varies by generation.

On 2008-11-14 NVIDIA released a beta version of a closed-source device driver and open-source API called VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) with PureVideo support for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo

VDPAU

VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an open source library (libvdpau) and API originally designed by NVIDIA for its GeForce 8 series and later GPU hardware, targeted at the X Window System on Unix-based operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris). This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

YouTube Blue Faces Fix

Ubuntu 12.04

cd /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer || cd /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/
sudo perl -pi.bak -e 's/libvdpau/lixvdpau/g' libflashplayer.so

Restart your web browser.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-blue

NVENC

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

Examples

Here are examples of software using VDPAU.

Mplayer

The error when you DO NOT have one of these new video cards...

[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1

How to use mplayer and vdpau with an ffmpeg x264 encoded video...

mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau video.avi

You will then see this output in the console...

Forced video codec: ffh264vdpau
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264vdpau] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264 (VDPAU))
[VD_FFMPEG] Trying pixfmt=0.
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [vdpau] 1280x720 => 1280x720 H.264 VDPAU acceleration 
[VD_FFMPEG] XVMC-accelerated MPEG-2.

...and the display is silky smooth, with only about 5% CPU usage :-) and no fans needed!

HandBrake

The error when you DO NOT have one of these new video cards...

No accelerated IMDCT transform found

MythTV

To use VDPAU in the MythTV Frontend, go to the menu:-

Utilities / Setup
   --> Setup
      --> TV Settings
         --> Playback
            --> Playback Profiles (3/8) and choose VDPAU Normal