HOWTO : Full HD playback with VideoLan and PPA on Ubuntu 10.04

This tutorial may read conjunction with the HOWTO : MyGica D689 USB HDTV dongle, VideoLan and PPA on Ubuntu 10.04 but the different is the display card. The display card (GeForce 8500GT) that using at the link does not support Full HD playback.

The CPU used in this tutorial does not support full HD playback.

Hardware and software used in this tutorial :

CPU - AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+
RAM - 8GB DDR2 800
Hard Drive - 500GB x 4 on Hardware RAID 10
Display card - nVidia GeForce GT240
Monitor - 4:3 LCD monitor (not full HD monitor)
Operating system - Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop AMD64

Step 1 :

Make sure you have installed the nVidia driver from repository.

"System" - "Administration" - "Hardware driver" - Select "Recommended"

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/cutting-edge-multimedia
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libvdpau1 vdpau-video ffmepg

Step 2 :

Install VideoLan and related packages.

sudo apt-get install x264 vlc mencoder qt4-qtconfig
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras quicktime-utils quicktime-x11utils libdvdnav4 libdvdread4 libdvdcss2 non-free-codecs faad

Or, you may require to reboot your system when necessary.

Step 3 :

*The settings below is only good for my hardware only. Yours may be different.

Run "VideoLan"

"Tools" -- "Preference" -- "Video Settings" -- Enable "Accelerated video output (Overlay)"

"Tools" -- "Preference" -- "Input and Codecs Settings" -- Enable "Use GPU acceleration (experimental)"

"Tools" -- "Preference" -- "Input and Codecs Settings" -- "x264 preset and tuning selection" -- Select "ultrafast" and "fastdecode"

Full HD video sample

You can download this sample for testing.

That's all! See you.