Ok I'm posting this in case it helps someone in the future.
Pokeing around a bit more with the Nouveau driver.
Here is what I suspect the problem with the [semi] open source.
One some [but not all] cards the Nouveau driver needs a firmware blob from the proprietary driver to work properly.
- from the Nouveau page :
Firmware
VPE1/2 do not require any firmware to run. However, VP1/2/3/4/5 all require firmware to operate that is presently extracted from the NVIDIA binary driver. We cannot redistribute the firmware directly in linux-firmware because NVIDIA's license forbids redistribution of parts of their driver.
An effort is underway to fully reverse the underlying engines and create open-source firmware to provide out-of-the-box video decoding, please join us in #nouveau on
www.oftc.net if you're interested in helping.
If you are lucky, your distribution may already have a package for installing the firmwares. Here is a list of the supported distribution:
Archlinux
Gentoo: sys-firmware/nvidia-firmware
More to come
Unfortunetly It looks like Ubuntu is not [yet] one of those disro's.
They have a method of downloading and extracting the blob, but I get some "magic" errors when I try using the extract_firmware.py application. Not sure whats up there.
I will reach out to them and see If I can clear that hurdle.