My Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra records videos in 8K (24 fps), and I'd like to be able to play those videos in VLC using Ubuntu 22.04. 4K videos play OK, but the 8K ones are very choppy and distorted. Is there a way to improve their performance? They play fine in VLC on Windows 10, so I figure there must be a way to get the same (or better) output within Ubuntu.
I have an RTX 3080 mobile processor with 16 GB of VRAM, an i7 11th-gen 8-core CPU, and 64 GB of RAM, so I don't think my system specs are the issue. I'm also playing the videos off an SSD. The problem still occurred when I launched VLC in dedicated graphics mode, and based on the output of watch nvidia-smi, the dedicated GPU does appear to be powering the video output.
Here is a copy of the log that I received when I opened VLC in Terminal and tried to play back a video:
VLC media player 3.0.16 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)
[0000555cdc533580] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[0000555cdc5d3450] main playlist: playlist is empty
[00007fb3d40029a0] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v4.192.1 (API v192)
libva info: VA-API version 1.14.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_0
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
[00007fb3d40029a0] glconv_vaapi_x11 gl error: vaCreateSurfaces: attribute not supported
[00007fb3f0000d80] main video output error: video output creation failed
[00007fb3e401ee90] main decoder error: failed to create video output
[00007fb3d44a41f0] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v4.192.1 (API v192)
[00007fb3e401ee90] avcodec decoder: Using NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 525.89.02 Wed Feb 1 23:08:15 UTC 2023 for hardware decoding
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e403bf00] Failed setup for format vdpau: hwaccel initialisation returned error.
[00007fb3e401ee90] avcodec decoder error: existing hardware acceleration cannot be reused
[00007fb3d44a41f0] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v4.192.1 (API v192)
[00007fb3d44a41f0] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v4.192.1 (API v192)
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4126500] Could not find ref with POC 4
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4136e00] Could not find ref with POC 6
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e403bf00] Could not find ref with POC 8
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e40b2d80] Could not find ref with POC 10
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e40c3380] Could not find ref with POC 12
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e40d3a00] Could not find ref with POC 14
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e40e40c0] Could not find ref with POC 16
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e40f4a00] Could not find ref with POC 18
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4105300] Could not find ref with POC 20
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4115c00] Could not find ref with POC 22
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4126500] Could not find ref with POC 0
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e4136e00] Could not find ref with POC 2
[hevc @ 0x7fb3e403bf00] Could not find ref with POC 4
(There were many similar 'Could not find ref' videos. Since my video has 24 frames per second, I'm guessing that the numbers refer to individual frames.)
Update: Interestingly, on a separate Ubuntu 22.04 installation on another drive, the videos played fine in VLC after I first opened one video in the default Ubuntu Videos app. I tried this approach in my main Ubuntu 22.04 installation, but it didn't work.
My separate Ubuntu installation uses intel graphics by default, so it's possible that the issue is with my NVIDIA setup on Ubuntu rather than with VLC. However, I found that switching my default graphics card back to Intel prevented my display from appearing on my second monitor, so I would like to find a solution that lets me play VLC videos using the NVIDIA graphics card (or lets me selectively run VLC within Intel if necessary).
Additional info:
When trying to play 8K videos using Ubuntu's Videos app, the frame rate was fine but the dimensions were way off: the video was much taller than it was wider (even though the original videos were in 16:9 resolution).
