Gaming Linux® From Scratch (System V Edition) - Version #f2b2

Chapter 3. Shared Dependencies

libvdpau-1.5

Introduction to libvdpau

The libvdpau package contains a library which implements the VDPAU library.

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. This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.

Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), VLD (variable-length decoding) and deblocking for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1, WMV3/WMV9 encoded videos. Which specific codecs of these that can be offloaded to the GPU depends on the version of the GPU hardware; specifically, to also decode MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), Xvid/OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 formats, a GeForce 200M (2xxM) Series (the eleventh generation of NVIDIA's GeForce graphics processing units) or newer GPU hardware is required.

libvdpau Dependencies

Required

Xorg Libraries

Recommended (Runtime)

The VDPAU driver suitable for the hardware in your system: libvdpau-va-gl-0.4.2 [3], Mesa-25.0.2 [4], and NVIDIA-570.133.07 [5].

Installation of libvdpau

Install libvdpau by running the following commands: 

mkdir build &&
cd    build &&

meson setup --prefix=/usr .. &&

ninja

To test the results, issue: ninja test. There is only one test for this package, dlclose, and it is known to fail on some systems.

Now, as the root user: 

ninja install

lib32 Installation of libvdpau

First clean the build directory: 

rm -rf *

Install lib32-libvdpau by running the following commands: 

CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32"         \
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib32/pkgconfig \
meson setup --prefix=/usr            \
            --libdir=/usr/lib32      \
            .. &&

ninja

Now, as the root user: 

DESTDIR=$PWD/DESTDIR ninja install                     &&
cp -vr DESTDIR/usr/lib32/* /usr/lib32                  &&
rm -rf DESTDIR                                         &&
ldconfig

Command Explanations

[Note]

Note

Inspect meson_options.txt for a full list of options.

Contents

Installed Programs: None
Installed Library: libvdpau.so
Installed Directories: /usr/{include,lib}/vdpau

Short Descriptions

libvdpau.so

contains functions to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware


[3] For Intel GPUs.

[4] Provides the r600, radeonsi, and nouveau VDPAU drivers, for the ATI/AMD Radeon HD 2xxx GPUs and later, and supported NVIDIA GPUs; Mesa must be built after this package for these drivers.

[5] For NVIDIA GPUs; proprietary.