Take the 2-minute tour ×

I am using an old PC Pentium4 2.4Ghz with nVidia GS 7900 AGP 256MB and I would like to support the video play from GPU. As far what I have read, the support for vdpau has come for nVidida 8 series.

Is there any way to support playing from GPU using mplayer?

share|improve this question
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… - VDPAU feature set is not available (that's more than just not being supported) in GeForce 7 series. Feature set is a hardware thing, you can't change that, so definitely not with VDPAU. Even though it might be possible using generic methods, I wouldn't expect that much... –  TNW Apr 17 '13 at 11:28
Could you mention what generic methods you mean ? –  jurka Apr 17 '13 at 11:44
A driver using regular processing capabilities of GPU. I doubt that thing is written as free software and available, especially because the popularity of general GPU calculations arised after CUDA and OpenCL came out, which happened first in GeForce 8 series for NVIDIA. –  TNW Apr 17 '13 at 13:07

3 Answers 3

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Your video card does not support VDPAU but it does support XvMC, which is a precursor to VDPAU. XvMC is notoriously difficult to get working, it is not as powerful as VDPAU, and it only supports acceleration of MPEG2 videos. However, it is the only option for accelerated video playback for your GPU and Linux.

The MPEG2 format is a an older format for compressing video files. It is not as efficient as more recent formats, such as MPEG4. Therefore, videos that have been encoded for distribution through the internet as well as many handheld video cameras and cell phones will typically be MPEG4 files. That being said, MPEG2 is widely used for broadcast television, both over-the-air and digital cable, as well as DVDs. Therefore, if your source of video is from TV or DVDs, then it is possible to play it back using XvMC.

The way to enable XvMC depends on your Linux distribution and requires the nvidia proprietary video drivers. Resources for installing these drivers and enabling XvMC for popular distributions can be found on various wiki:

Once you have the nvidia driver and enable XvMC, you can use it with mplayer with

mplayer -vo xvmc <video file>
share|improve this answer

Try installing the latest SMPlayer from here.

I have a media PC that has 2.0Ghz Core2Duo and a GT240. The Core2Duo can't play 1080p playback, it locks to 100% usage on the first core and the video is choppy. This is when I play video via VLC for example. If I use SMplayer, it renders on the GPU, CPU usage is around 10% and playback is perfect.

share|improve this answer

Such an old machine is unlikely to give you much in terms of performance. Even a cheap new machine will probably be much better.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


