hardware accelerated decoding

[mint-maniac]

How do I find out if my graphics card supports hardware accelerated decoding (short of googling the hardware specs and hoping to somehow find it)?

I recently updated my old laptop from mint 19.3 cinnamon to 20 and then took it to 20.3.
That transition went fairly smoothly but noticed VLC media player not working. Would crash in trying to view every DVD movie I tried. The crash log wasn't overly helpful. I uninstalled VLC and reinstalled it and that had no effect. Celluloid media player had no issues other than the sound wasn't very loud for some reason even when set to the max. So I decided to investigate what was going on with VLC on my machine.

Now there's many posts about VLC horrors and different solutions that worked for others but I found that simply turning off what VLC calls "Hardware accelerated decoding" solved my issue. It was previously set to "Automatic" and I simply changed it to "Disabled". I noticed my cinnamon session doesn't need to use software rendering (an option on login) so that's apparently somewhat different. But made me start wondering how I can tell if a graphics chip supports this decoding.

My graphics information is below and I realize this is a pretty old box. But am wondering if there's something short of "looking at the hardware" and googling it, to know what it supports? That is, is there some setting, command line or otherwise that would tell me this information?

Code: Select all

Graphics:  Device-1: AMD RV515/M54 [Mobility Radeon X1400] vendor: Lenovo Thinkpad T60 model 2007 
           driver: radeon v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 1002:7145 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa 
           resolution: 1280x960~60Hz 

[ThaCrip]

I don't think GPU acceleration helps with DVD off the top of my head. either way, but I would not worry about it since it's easy for CPU's to process SD video (720x480 etc). I would be more concerned about getting GPU acceleration when it comes to h264 720p/1080p (or the like). in that regard I just play a file through Celluloid with MPV installed (sudo apt install mpv) and hardware acceleration 'just works' on all three of my computers (two desktops, one laptop).

for h264 720p/1080p files you can probably see the CPU load increase if you disable GPU acceleration in Celluloid... 'Preferences > Miscellaneous' and the 'Extra mpv options' section that says 'hwdec=yes' you can remove this and try playing a the same video again to see how much the CPU load percentage increases. there is a increase on CPU load without that and then put it back and play the same video etc and you can see a rough idea of the CPU load percentage differences.

but the older the CPU the higher the load on it without GPU acceleration with h264 video etc.

on a laptop I have it's CPU (AMD E-300) is not fast enough to play x264(h264) 720p and especially 1080p without GPU acceleration so it's a obvious difference on this setup. but when I use that Celluloid+MPV setup to get hardware acceleration it can play the files. I had to use Xfce though as on Cinnamon/MATE doing the exact same thing, there is obvious stutter in the video playback that works as expected with Xfce on this particular laptop. even my main PC benefits from Xfce over Cinnamon etc but it's not as obvious as with the main PC, which I leave running all of the time, Cinnamon will be okay for a while but say after it sits overnight and I go to play a 720p/1080p h264 video file the next day with GPU acceleration like usual, you can see it's got a bit of stutter and I can temporarily fix it by ALT+F2 then press 'r' then enter, which restarts Cinnamon, and the slight but consistent stutter will go away for a while again (but there is decent chance you won't even experience that issue I suspect). but on Xfce I don't have any issues and I can leave it running a long time. in fact, my current uptime (91d 20hr+) on my main PC is my record uptime and video playback on my main PC (i5-3550 CPU / 1050 Ti 4GB GPU), which has Mint v21.1-Xfce, still works as expected. so it's rock stable in this regard.

even my old computer, which is basically high end 2005 motherboard tech (ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe), which I built in March 2006, I used to use that for hardware accelerated video playback for a while with a Radeon 5670 512MB, which I bought in 2010 (along with it's current AMD Athlon X2 3600+ 2.0GHz overclocked to 2.3GHz), and that worked fine with GPU acceleration (when I was using it's (Radeon 5670 512MB GPU) HDMI port to the TV would have been from basically May 2016 until July 2017). so I would imagine unless your GPU is fairly ancient it can probably hardware accelerate h264 video.

p.s. while I realize VLC is popular video playback software, I never cared for it personally. it's not as snappy etc as Celluloid+MPV combo. even someone who wants a bit more features I would suggest SMPlayer.