AMD GPU owner sought for quick test

snap
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Could someone with an AMD GPU which supports hardware accelerated video playback in VLC please try a snap for me? Unfortunately I don’t have an AMD based machine handy to test this. You’ll need some local video to test playback. I recommend something h264 encoded, such as a big buck bunny sample clip.

wget http://people.canonical.com/~alan/vlc_daily_amd64.snap
sudo snap install vlc_daily_amd64.snap --dangerous
snap run vlc /path/to/some/video.mp4

Please check the output, making sure it actually launches of course, and see if you get mentions of vdpau, or other hardware accelerated playback. Let me know the result please. Does it play? Do you get hardware accelerated playback with no options fiddling?

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Can you tell me if we need any particular drivers installed? I have twin AMD GPUs in my desktop and I can test this.

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I don’t know, I don’t own any AMD GPUs. In theory this should work (or indeed be made to work) on any AMD GPU, so I’m keen to know whatever your experience is.

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I just tested this on my AMD box featuring Athlon X4 845 and dual GPUs VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Tahiti XT [Radeon HD 7970/8970 OEM / R9 280X].

I downloaded the snap as instructed and performed the test on 4.13.0-16-generic using snapd 2.30~rc1 on a Ubuntu 17.10 host.

I tried a few movies on my disk and I saw this printed on the console:

[00007f782801a800] avcodec decoder: Using G3DVL VDPAU Driver Shared Library version 1.0 for hardware decoding

I dragged the display from one GPU to another (they are connected to separate monitors) and it all worked without any issues. Audio was working flawlessly as well.

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This is not related to AMD graphics but this build of VLC has some issues with subtitles (encoding probably)

253F813C-FF88-40B3-AC84-248C6FE2D9ED
253F813C-FF88-40B3-AC84-248C6FE2D9ED4032×3024 3 MB

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Magic, very helpful, thank you!