It’s only listing a couple of Video surface types now and not kicking in for most files in VLC/mpv:
Video surface:
name width height types
420 4096 4096 NV12 YV12
422 4096 4096 UYVY YUYV
Nevermind, it’s just VLC.
Looks like VLC is calling it a won’tfix though: H.264 >720p: blocky / pixelated playback in Ubuntu 16.04 & VLC 2.2.2 (#16877) · Issues · VideoLAN / VLC · GitLab
Did you only change the driver, or did you upgrade other software as well?
Can you please attach nvidia-bug-report.log.gz files and the output of vdpauinfo from your working and non-working configurations?
Actually, I gave this a try and I can reproduce the corruption even with old drivers, and even with the nouveau driver’s implementation of VDPAU or with “Hardware-accelerated decoding” disabled in VLC’s preferences menu. So I’m pretty sure this isn’t a regression or a driver bug.
It is a minor regression afaict – VAAPI decoding under VLC 2.1.x and Nvidia 361 only exhibited corruption on seeking; both VAAPI and the newly supported VDPAU (which should be identical as VAAPI is just a shim) have nearly constant corruption under VLC 2.2.x and Nvidia 364 (though this goes away when switching to pure software decoding + rendering).
That said, it’s probably on their end (particularly as mpv works fine with VDPAU), so I’d understand if it’s not really practical for you to follow up.
FWIW, Nvidia’s VDPAU also seems not to work in Chromium if you rebuild the browser to enable it, whereas Intel’s does: http://www.kelvinblog.tk/enable-chromium-vaapi-hardware-acceleration-linux/
Basically, Nvidia VDPAU only seems to work in mplayer/mpv.
This might actually be a 16.04 libav issue…