VDPAU
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.
Contents
Supported hardware
Open source drivers:
- AMD Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by the mesa-vdpau package, available in the official repositories.
- Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libvdpau-va-gl package together with the libva-intel-driver.
- NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by the mesa-vdpau package, available in the official repositories. It requires the nouveau-fw package, which contains the required firmware to operate that is presently extracted from the NVIDIA binary driver.
Proprietary drivers:
- AMD Radeon HD 4000 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libvdpau-va-gl package (available in the official repositories) together with the libva-xvba-driver package. It uses the catalyst-utils driver for Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, and catalyst-total-hd234k for Radeon HD 4000 series.
- NVIDIA GeForce 400 series and newer GPUs are supported by the nvidia-utils package, available in the official repositories.
- GeForce 8/9 and GeForce 100-300 series are supported by the nvidia-340xx-utils package.
Supported formats
Open source | Proprietary | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
AMD | Intel | Nvidia | AMD | Nvidia | |
MPEG2 decoding | Radeon 9500 and newer | |
GeForce 8 and newer | |
GeForce 8 and newer |
MPEG4 decoding | Radeon HD 6000 and newer | |
GeForce 200 and newer | |
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 | |
GeForce 83 and newer | |
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
- Adobe Flash Player: see Browser plugins#Adobe Flash Player.
- MPlayer/mplayer2: see MPlayer#Enabling_VDPAU.
- gnome-mplayer - To enable hardware acceleration: Edit > Preferences > Player, then set Video Output to
vdpau
. - smplayer - To enable hardware acceleration: Options > Preferences > General > Video, then set Output driver to
vdpau
. - bomi - Enabled by default.
- mpv: see Mpv#Hardware_Decoding.
- VLC media player: see VLC media player#Hardware acceleration support.