Ubuntu Media Playing Packages

nVidia drivers 195.36.08

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:12:56 +1100

nVidia has released a new series for the graphical drivers: 195.36.08 and put them on the official list

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2196696

It’s already available in the “release” directory ; to use it simply install nvidia-195-glx ; then reboot your PC.

Release highlights:
• Added support for the following GPUs:
◦ Quadro FX 880M
◦ GeForce GTS 350M
◦ GeForce GTS 360M
• Fixed a bug that caused screen corruption after an application released a GLX_NV_present_video device.
• Fixed an X server crash caused by starting nvidia-settings while X was not on the active VT.
• Fixed brightness control hotkeys on some laptops.
• Fixed an nvidia-settings bug that produced many "Bad argument" warning messages when running nvidia-settings --query all.
• Fixed an installer bug that produced the following message: Code: WARNING: Unable to perform the runtime configuration check for library
• 'libGL.so.1' ('/usr/lib/libGL.so.195.36.03'); assuming successful installation. 
• Fixed a bug that caused G-Sync stereo synchronization to fail sometimes when enabling frame lock.
• Fixed a bug that caused OpenGL applications to occasionally crash with "double free or corruption" messages when exiting.
• On GPUs with VDPAU feature set A, enhanced VDPAU's handling of some corrupted or incorrectly formatted MPEG-1/2 streams. This solves a reported issue with "0testbad.mpg".
• Fixed a bug in the VDPAU video mixer that caused chroma aberrations, and corruption in the right-hand few columns of pixels, when post- processing video surfaces with widths not an exact multiple of 4 pixels.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the GPUFanControlState attribute from being set on the nvidia-settings command line.

nVidia drivers 195.22

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:31:47 +1100

nVidia has released a new series for the graphical drivers: 195.22

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2129618

One of the important change is that you can now play more than one video at a time with VDPAU.

It’s already available in the “release” directory ; to use it simply install nvidia-195-glx ; then reboot your PC.

Release highlights:
• Enhanced the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue to provide values of "first_presentation_time" that have less jitter.
• Add support for R16F and RG32F GLXFBConfigs when using GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs.
• Added support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo on Linux with Quadro GPUs. See the "Stereo" X configuration documentation in the README for details.
• Added support for A2BGR10 32-bit GLX visuals on 30-bit X screens. These allow some level of window transparency when using 30-bit visuals with GLX and Composite, but they may cause problems with older X servers and/or applications. ARGB GLX visuals can be disabled by adding: Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "False" to the X configuration file.
• Fixed a problem that caused DisplayPort devices to behave incorrectly when DPMS power saving mode was triggered.
• Updated VDPAU to improve thread concurrency. See the README for details.
• Altered NVIDIA X driver behavior in the case that no display devices are connected to the GPU. Previously, in this case, the NVIDIA X driver would pretend a CRT was connected to the GPU. Now, the NVIDIA X driver will not automatically pretend that any CRTs are connected. If the X driver does not detect any connected display devices, the X server will fail to start.  To restore the old behavior, use the ConnectedMonitor X configuration option; e.g., Option "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT" Alternatively, if display is not desired, Quadro and Tesla GPU users can enable "NoScanout" mode, which bypasses any mode timing validation or use of display devices; this is configured with: Option "UseDisplayDevice" "none"
• Disabled software cursors when the driver is operating in "no scanout" (UseDisplayDevice "none") mode. The software cursor image is not visible in remote desktop applications or screenshots anyway, so having software cursor enabled was unnecessary.
• Changed glXSwapBuffers() behavior for a pixmap such that it is now a no-op in the direct rendering case in order to match the indirect case and comply with the GLX spec. Previously, calling glXSwapBuffers() on pixmaps in the direct case would swap the pixmap's buffers if the pixmap was double buffered.
• Modified the installation location and names of internal VDPAU libraries to conform to conventions and Debian packaging guidelines. New versions of libvdpau expect this layout. Compatibility with old versions of libvdpau is maintained with symlinks.
• Fixed a bug that could cause errors in graphical applications run after a previous application using VDPAU and OpenGL. This behaviour was observed when running Gwenole Beauchesne's hwdecode-demos application.
• Modified vdpau.h to increment VDPAU_VERSION, to reflect the fact that new features have been added in the past. Also, add the new define VDPAU_INTERFACE_VERSION.
• Fixed a periodic temporary hang in the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue.
• Fixed a problem that caused resolution limitations or corruption on certain DisplayPort devices such as the Apple 24" Cinema display or some DisplayPort to VGA adapters.
• Disabled the UseEvents option for GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs due to a problem that causes occasional short hangs. It will be re-enabled when that bug has been tracked down and fixed.
• VDPAU now allows multiple streams to be decoded at once, without the need to set any environment variables.

How are MythTV packages versioned

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:09:10 +1100

I’ve been asked a few times on how the mythtv packages in both the release and trunk repository are versioned...

MythTV packages are built every day at 8AM GMT.

The version number is based on the latest MythTV SVN revision.
The version is the latest one where changes occurred for the particular module. Unlike mythbuntu weekly-build repository, it is not of the latest general SVN revision.

For example, say the latest SVN revision of MythTV is 28900 ; but the last modifications made to the mythtv-fixes 0.22 occurred in SVN #27500 ; then mythtv-fixes 0.22 will have the version 27500.

Release;
* MythTV:
The version used is of the SVN revision where the last change to http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-22-fixes/mythtv/ occurred. It is not of the last overall SVN revision
* Mythplugins:
The version used is of the SVN revision where the last change to http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-22-fixes/mythplugins/ occurred.
* MythThemes:
The version used is of the SVN revision where the last change to http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-22-fixes/myththemes/ occurred.

Trunk:
It is similar to the release repository, except it follows the MythTV trunk SVN repository ;
MythTV is http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv
Mythplugins is http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythplugins ; with one important difference:
If the binary version number of mythtv was changed after a modification to mythplugins ; then mythplugins is automatically recompiled and the version number is of the last modification made to http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv/libs/libmythdb/mythversion.h
This is to ensure that mythplugins packages always work with the latest build of the main mythtv packages.
Myththemes is http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/myththemes

Debugging and Generating backtrace

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:23:12 +1100

New components were added to the repositories:
release-dbgsym and
trunk-dbgsym

These components contains debugging symbol packages for mythtv, mplayer and others. Those are useful for generating backtraces should a program crash and you want to help to fix it.

If you have found a way to consistently reproduce a crash ; enable the release-dbgsym or trunk-dbgsym component.
For example, for Karmic you would change:
deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos karmic release
into:
deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos karmic release release-dbgsym

The name of the debugging package would be:
xxxx-dbgsym
where xxx would be the name of the standard package. So if you found that the crash occurs in a program like mplayer do:
sudo apt-get install mplayer-dbgsym

then reproduce the crash and generate a backtrace to report the bug upstream.

Karmic and Using Avenard repo

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 23:50:19 +1100

Following the announcement made by nVidia there:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=138880

Following what I posted here

It seems this hasn’t been clear for everyone on how to enable my repo. People are reporting errors such as:

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libvdpau0_0.2-0ubuntu11_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so', which is also in package nvidia-185-libvdpau 0:185.18.36-0ubuntu9

As I wrote earlier, my nvidia driver packages aren’t fully compatible with the one that comes with Ubuntu/Mythbuntu Karmic.

However, migrating to my repo is easy, if you do it properly...

Start synaptic ... Enable the Avenard repo ; now search for nvidia. Select all 185.xx related nvidia drivers (nvidia-glx-185, nvidia-185-libvdpau) and upgrade those AND ONLY THOSE. Do not upgrade anything else yet.
Click “Apply”.
Now install libvdpau1

Alternatively, from the command-line, assuming you have enabled the Avenard repo:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-185 nvidia-185-libvdpau nvidia-185-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install libvdpau1

If you want to continue using all the packages the Avenard repo provides, then click on upgrade all and let it finish the job...
or:
sudo apt-get upgrade