Adobe CS5.5 Mercury Playback Engine [NVIDIA CUDA Acceleration]

Adobe and Nvidia worked together to include Nvidia CUDA support in CS5 and CS5.5, which gave birth to the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration. Essentially MPE GPU Acceleration drastically cuts down video encode times and enables real timeline editing with multiple layers of video and effects! No more choppy video playback, no more render to preview, and no more transcoding because it can be done in real time. What this means for us normal folk is that the price of a professional video editing machine is now attainable, and all for the price of a video card upgrade.* 

For some real world usage, at the beginning of 2010, I took a backpacking trip through Vietnam, and I wanted to video blog the entire trip. Armed with an Asus G60VX w/Nvidia GTX260M laptop and a Canon 5D Mark II, I was able to capture 1080p footage and import the raw files straight into Premiere to edit. Recording was done during the day, and at night the footage was edited, encoded, and uploaded. The encoding times were unbelievably fast. Yes, and all on a portable laptop! If you were to ask me to do this 2 years ago, I'd tell you I'd need thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a team to lug it around.

Fast forward to today, I upgraded my old trustworthy Dell XPS 420 rig with a Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 560 1GB DDR5/336 CUDA cores/256-bit and a 600 watt OCZ ModXStream Pro power supply. I took a video project that I encoded before, which encoded via CPU around 20 minutes, and with GPU acceleration encoded the project in under 5 minutes. The yellow render bar was racing to the right to completion--this still amazes me today.

Dell XPS 420                                                      

Intel Q6600 2.4GHz CPU

4GB RAM

Western Digital Velociraptor 10K 300GB drive

Transcend 32GB SSD

Tandberg TS400 LTO2Tape Drive

*Upgrade must be to a base system that's decent i.e. at least Quad Core CPU, 4GB RAM, 7200RPM drive. You may need to upgrade your power supply to power the new graphic card. Check out Studio 1 Productions for all the info on card comparisons, instructions to enabling GPU accleration, and more.

XBMC & Nvidia VDPAU on Ubuntu 11.10 with working Sound over HDMI

I've successfully built another XBMC Ubuntu 11.10 machine with sound over HDMI thanks to various internet resources and some good ole troubleshooting. Sound is audible through the Internet Browser as well as through XBMC, so we have system sounds as well as movie sounds enabled. 

My system plays 1080p and 720p movies smoothly with almost no CPU utilization e.g. a 15 gigabyte 1080p Blu-ray rip runs perfectly smooth. Nvidia's VDPAU handles all of the HD processing, and the video is stunning. Also, XMBC's AEON skin is just as beautiful. Note: Adobe's Flash 11 has numerous bugs in its current state, so it does not work 100% with this build, and it seems slightly more stable in Firefox than in Chrome.

This tutorial should work for Nvidia hardware users as well as give some troubleshooting ideas for ATI users.

Tutorial

My Setup:

Acer Revo R1600 (stock and unmodded)

Nvidia ION LE

Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit

HDMI

Instructions:

1. Install Ubuntu 11.10

2. Get the Nvidia driver
How To Install Nvidia 275.09.07 Driver in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot?

3. Install XBMC
Install XBMC on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot/Linux

4. Getting Sound to play over HDMI may take several steps:

First, check to see if sound is enabled and unmuted. SPDIF should be unmuted as well:

From Ubuntuforums user lidex on http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10363314&postcount=3 :

"Code:

alsasmixer

Press <F6> to select the correct soundcard.

Press <F3> to show playback levels. <F4> selects capture levels [or use <Tab>]

Use the left/right arrow keys to select and up/down arrow keys to change levels. <M> to mute/unmute.

Go to "System ->Preferences ->Sound" and make sure the correct soundcard is default and adjust your profile on the hardware tab. 

On the output tab choose the correct device."

Then we'll check to see where our sound device is located by:

Code:

aplay -l

(Mine was 0,3)

Next, we'll load a module to finally get system sounds working:

From Ubuntuforums user efflandt on http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10367062&postcount=5 (I've modified the hardware location to match my hardware 0,3) :

"

Code:

aplay -D plughw:0,3 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

Mine is 0,3 so I added a line to /etc/pulse/default.pa after alsa-sink line:

Code:

#load-module module-alsa-sink
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,3

Reboot. The only odd thing it that in the Output tab of Sound Preferences you will need to select the HDA NVidia device that does NOT say HDMI to get HDMI sound. The speaker test in Sound Preferences will not work, but if you play Rythmbox, etc. you should be able to switch sound output on the fly."

Lastly, we're going to enable HDMI sound in XBMC

Select HDMI in Audio Output

Under Audio Output Device, select Defaults

For passthrough sound to your receiver, choose the setting your setup requires.

Now get some popcorn going, sit back, and enjoy your HTPC!

Troubleshooting & Tips

Fix Video Tearing:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/74519/how-to-remove-tearing-in-videos-with-nvidia-driver

Overscan compensation:

Enable HD flash
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1685845

Change icon size
http://www.upubuntu.com/2011/10/how-to-resize-gnome-shell-icons-in.html

Change font sizes (just change the DPI for bigger fonts)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11484414

Autologin
http://www.groupofnowhere.com/2011/10/19/xubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelot/