VA-API

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Video Acceleration API is a specification and open source library to provide hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.

Supported hardware

Open source drivers:

Proprietary drivers:

Supported formats

Open source Proprietary
AMD Intel Nvidia AMD Nvidia
MPEG2 decoding Radeon 9500 and newer GMA 4500 and newer GeForce 8 and newer Radeon HD 4000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG4 decoding Radeon HD 6000 and newer
GeForce 200 and newer Radeon HD 6000 and newer GeForce 200 and newer
H264 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
VC1 decoding Radeon HD 4000 and newer Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer GeForce 8200, 8300, 8400, 9300, 200 and newer Radeon HD 4000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG2 encoding
Ivy Bridge Graphics and newer
H264 encoding
Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer

1Supported by the libva-intel-driver-g45-h264AUR package. See H.264 decoding on GMA 4500 for instructions and caveats.

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

$ vainfo

VAEntrypointVLD means that your card is capable to decode this format, VAEntrypointEncSlice means that you can encode to this format.

Configuration

libva-vdpau-driver has to be enabled manually with an environment variable globally or locally per user.

export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau

Supported software

  • GStreamer based players - VA-API is used automatically, if supported format found.
See more at http://docs.gstreamer.com/display/GstSDK/Playback+tutorial+8%3A+Hardware-accelerated+video+decoding.