# nvidia-drivers vaapi vdpau

## kitus

Hi Community,

I'm new in gentoo forums, i've spend a lot of time working with gentoo that i love to, i've been working around other linux distros also, cuz at the beggining gentoo makes me feel frustated as a desktop, as a server is damn great. I'm been working as a developer for a long time, and that's why i can let gentoo go, is great make every package from source, it gives me a lot of benefits, and i love it.

So after that lovely speech, i build a new desktop that i think using it as software development LAB, and i bought a nvidia card GeForce GT 730, i have my desktop working, but i can stop to looking for tunning the system(sickness), when i was working in qemu for my android developments, it ask me for gles2 use flag on mesa package, and i found vaapi and vdpau flags, i research about it on guides into the gentoo documentation, and it says vdpau works out of the box, in your experience if i'm using nvidia-drivers propetary-375.26 it works really great with 4.9 gentoo sources, do i need to activate those flags, i meant put vaapi and vdpau flags into de make.conf file, does it improve my system ? 

That's a lot for ur time and patient, sorry for my english i'm from mexico, and i hope don't asking something stupid.

Big huge for this amazing community....

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## Roman_Gruber

Hi

I am a desctop user.

Questiong regarding frustrating desctop.

Those big blown up desctops like gnome 2, kde3, lxde, ... I usually ripped out half of the components and adapted it.

I ended up with a self made, i3wm + custom script for the special keys of my notebook.

I am not fond of automounting. Over the years the auto mount folder has changed several times, hardly worked, just annoying.

When i mount it myself, i see where it ismounted and how. E.g. no write permissions on ntfs drives. 

You should adapt it to your needs. 

--

Regarding vdpau ...

After the X700 ATI gpu disaster in linux i went over to NVIDIA GPUs.

The stuff which annoys me is that those GPU drivers in general suck in linux. They are binaries or the cards do not have enough RAM or power. E.g. intel is a very bad choice regarding video acceleration regardless of which gpu you have.

When you are lucky your nvidia driver will work. but it will only work with some kernels and some xorg-servers for example.

those acceleration regarding vdpau and such maybe are just needed for multimedia apps like vlc. I think mplayer is dead? than there was mpv?

I did not see much difference with vdpau or not.

That cuda toolkit, i think that was the name, is over 1GB in downloads and hardly does anything.

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## Jaglover

It depends. For  watching video hardware decoding in Intel is better than nVidia. You need very expensive nVidia graphics card to do the same Intel does. See below my onboard Skylake.

```
~ $ vainfo 

libva info: VA-API version 0.39.4

libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0

libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/va/drivers/i965_drv_video.so

libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39

libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0

vainfo: VA-API version: 0.39 (libva 1.7.3)

vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 1.7.3

vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints

      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSliceLP

      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointEncSliceLP

      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointEncSliceLP

      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileNone                   : VAEntrypointVideoProc

      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           : VAEntrypointEncPicture

      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          : VAEntrypointEncSlice

      VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointVLD

      VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
```

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## kitus

Sorry for didn't response before but i don't know why i didn't get an email notification from this post, i play around for this flags, turn them on and off, and the better performance i got was turning them off as default, i check logs and everything works well and i get good quality from the propetary drivers, i think cuz it's all out of the box.

When i turned them on, i got black wird screens, mainly from the mesa packages, which ones asked me for gles2 only.

thanks for ur reponses, i choosed nvidia cuz it was cheaper ejejejjee, i'm not a gamer o graphic designer, i'm developer and i spend my time coding and watching movies on kodi, so nvidia is good enough... 

Thanks for ur comments

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## Jaglover

AFAIK the proprietary driver does not use MESA, as a matter of fact I once removed it from one of my nVidia computers and everything worked just fine.

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## kitus

tnks jaglover, i learned that nvidia works out of box with the propetary driver, so few things may be need it. 

But what about the recommended global flags (make.conf) when using propetary drivers ?

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