SMPlayer Support Forum

Hi, just a little background - I've been having trouble with SMPlayer's video, it can be choppy at times, and it's really bad if I apply the sharpen filter. I can live without the sharpen filter but the general choppiness was getting on my nerves so I did a little searching. I see some users mentioning a "VDPAU" video output driver in Preferences. This doesn't appear for me, just "default", "opengl", "direct3D", "image" and "tct". Then I went about trying to make VDPAU available because it had solved similar issues for other users. In my searches there are lots of mentions of Linux, Ubuntu etc but I run Windows 10. Maybe VDPAU isn't a Windows "thing"? I use Nvidia GEForce 310M (which seems to be compatible with VDPAU, according to searches). So how do I go about 'installing' VDPAU? I've made sure my GEForce driver is up to date, but the VDPAU option isn't there. I've looked on the freedesktop-dot-org website but I'm stuck.
Btw, other things I've tried to solve the choppiness issue: Increasing cache size - No effect. I've tried enabling Direct Rendering and Postprocessing - Nada.
System details: Windows 10 Home, Intel Quad Core i7 Q740 1.73Ghz, 4GB RAM - video file is playing right now and I still have 1GB RAM unused so my machine is not overtaxed.
Sorry, I'm not a big techie but I've tried my best
TLDR: Is VDPAU video output driver not compatible with Windows? Thanks in advance

VDPAU is for linux only.

Have you tried to enable hardware decoding in preferences -> performance? You can also try to increase the threads for decoding.

If that doesn't work, you can try this: select mplayer as multimedia engine and then select directx as video output. Maybe it works better for you.

Thanks for that rvm, clears up my VDPAU confusion! Hardware decoding helped a bit but choppiness was still there. I tried mplayer engine then and direct x but then it got worse again. I reverted to mpv with decoding and upped my graphics card refresh rate and the combination seems to have solved things. Thanks for your advice

The solution that might help
Hardware decoding enabled to auto.
1. Go to preferences of smplayer OPTIONS---->General (left window)---->general (right window)--->multimedia engine
change to mplayer (If is not already). hit OK.
Smplayer will restart.
2. Smplayer OPTIONS---->General (left window)---->video(right window)--->output driver choose a driver. hit apply.
general (right window)--->multimedia engine change to mpv. hit OK.

Repeat 1 and 2 changing output driver till will be satisfactory the performance of the player
This can be successful at least till 2xspeed with enabled sharpen speed. With faster speed maybe will start again the chopping.