VDPAU

Related articles

Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix is an open source library and API to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.

Supported hardware

Open source drivers:

Proprietary drivers:

Supported formats

Open source Proprietary
AMD Intel Nvidia AMD Nvidia
MPEG2 decoding Radeon 9500 and newer
2
GeForce 8 and newer
2
GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG4 decoding Radeon HD 6000 and newer
GeForce 200 and newer
2
GeForce 200 and newer
H.264 decoding Radeon HD 4000 and newer GMA 45001, Ironlake Graphics and newer GeForce 8 and newer Radeon HD 4000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer
H.265 decoding
upcoming: GeForce 9004 and newer
VC1 decoding Radeon HD 4000 and newer
2
GeForce 83 and newer
2
GeForce 83 and newer
  • 1 Supported by the libva-intel-driver-g45-h264 package, which is available in the AUR. See Intel graphics#H.264 decoding on GMA 4500 for instructions and caveats.
  • 2 VA GL driver doesn't support any other hardware decoder than H.264 (situation in 2014-06-21 master, and 0.3.x).
  • 3 Except GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS (320/640 MB).
  • 4 Except GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980.

In order to check what features are supported by your GPU, run the following command, which is provided by the vdpauinfo package:

$ vdpauinfo

Configuration

The environment variable VDPAU_DRIVER determines the driver file used. You can enable the environment variable globally or locally per user.

The correct driver name depends on your setup:

  • For Intel Graphics or AMD Catalyst you need to set it to va_gl.
  • For the open source AMD/ATI driver, you need to set it to the proper driver version depending on your GPU. You can determine the driver name by running
$ grep -i vdpau /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) RADEON(0): [DRI2] VDPAU driver: r300

in which case you want to set VDPAU_DRIVER=r300

Hybrid graphics

For hybrid setups (both NVIDIA and AMD), it may be necessary to set following environment variable:

$ export DRI_PRIME=1

For more information, see the PRIME wiki page.

Supported software

Tango-mail-mark-junk.png

Tango-mail-mark-junk.png

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements.

Reason: Bad formatting of this list (Discuss)