nvidia and mplayer: "[VD_FFMPEG] DRI failure."

Question

I've been getting this error message every time I run mplayer, no matter what video rendering method I choose. I've tried vdpau, xv, and gl. I thought maybe mplayer is reverting to software rendering. I am getting some tearing, so the video quality could be better. My hardware is a little old---an nvidia GeForce 9500 GT. This is its lspci entry:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1)

I'm using mplayer-37379, version 340.76 of the nvidia proprietary drivers, and version 1.1 of libvdpau. Any help would be much appreciated.