[378.09] still no VP9 8 bit and HEVC 10 bit support of VDPAU

Why does it take Nvidia so long to implement this on Linux? It’s available for quite some time on Windows now. I can’t watch YouTube 4k 60fps VP9 video because of this, very annoying.
And yes, the driver does simply not support it. VDPAU with supported formats works fine here with mpv.
Any words on when we can expect VP9 8 bit and HEVC 10 bit VDPAU support?

Use cuda hwdec in mpv.

Would you mind to explain how I can get mpv CUDA decoding to work with latest 378.09 drivers on OpenSuse Tumbleweed?

You need a build of ffmpeg master (or 3.3 when it’s out) and then build mpv 0.23 or newer against it. If you don’t want to build yourself and you’re on Ubuntu, you can use this ppa:

Thank you. Last time I tried compiling ffmpeg/mpv on OpenSuse, that didn’t work so well for me (unlike on Ubuntu/Debian, where copy&paste worked out).
So seems I have to wait for ffmpeg, unless I want to invest quite some time with uncertain result.
Nevertheless, Nvidia’s behavior regarding VDPAU is very disappointing.

I imaging packages for ffmpeg 3.3 in tumbleweed will show up pretty quickly after it’s released.

I gave compiling ffmpeg and mpv again a try on Tumbleweed and it worked out well this time (of course it was a dependency issue).
CUVID seems to be working well (or at least cuvid-copy in mpv, native cuvid result looks like half of the fps with 60fps video). cuvid-copy also seems to “fix” a stutter problem in conjunction with KWin compositing.
So your advice was golden, thanks a lot!

(still would be nice if Nvidia would support VDPAU better, or even better VAAPI instead).

That surprises me. the fully accelerated cuvid path copies frames directly to OpenGL surfaces in GPU memory, while cuvid-copy copies them through system memory. So, any visual problems you see (like low fps) should be the same in either case - as the display output in mpv is the same for both cases.

There’s lots of weird behavior between Nvidia driver, mpv and compositors which is not really explainable.
For example, when using software decoding and no compositor except of plain X (so one source of trouble less), I’m getting lots of dropped frames with mpv and certain settings. As soon as I enforce triple buffering in the Nvidia driver via xorg.conf, this problem disappears (but other applications like Firefox OGL show tearing or stutter).
Guess such problems are nasty side effects to expect when you have a blackbox driver in an open environment like Linux.