# Hardware video acceleration

Related articles

- XvMC

Hardware video acceleration makes it possible for the video card to decode/encode video, thus offloading the CPU and saving power.

There are several ways to achieve this on Linux:

- Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is a specification and open source library to provide both hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding, developed by Intel.
- Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is an open source library and API to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware, developed by NVIDIA.
- X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) is an extension for the X.Org Server, allowing video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware.

## Support

### Formats

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: I haven't found a usable list for libva-mesa-driver or amdgpu-pro-vdpauAUR. (Discuss in Talk:Hardware video acceleration#)
Note: To choose the correct driver see #Installation.

VA-API
| libva-intel-driver [1] | libva-mesa-driver | libva-vdpau-driver | xvba
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Decoding
MPEG2 | GMA 4500 and newer | ? | See VDPAU. | Radeon HD 4000 and newer
MPEG4 | ✗ | ? | Radeon HD 6000 and newer
H.264 | GMA 45001, Ironlake Graphics and newer | ? | Radeon HD 4000 and newer
HEVC (H.265) | Cherryview/Braswell and newer | ? | ?
VC1 | Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer | ? | Radeon HD 4000 and newer
VP8 | Broadwell and newer | ? | ?
VP9 | Broxton and newer | ? | ?
Encoding
MPEG2 | Ivy Bridge Graphics and newer | ? | ✗ | ✗
H.264 | Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer | ? | ✗
HEVC (H.265) | Skylake and newer | ? | ?
VP8 | Cherryview/Braswell and newer | ? | ?
VP9 | Kaby Lake and newer | ? | ?

VDPAU
| mesa-vdpau | libvdpau-va-gl | amdgpu-pro-vdpauAUR | nvidia-utils
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Decoding
MPEG2 | Radeon 9500 and newer, GeForce 8 and newer | ✗2 | ? | GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG4 | Radeon HD 6000 and newer, GeForce 200 and newer | ? | GeForce 200 and newer
H.264 | Radeon HD 4000 and newer, GeForce 8 and newer | See VA-API. | ? | GeForce 8 and newer
HEVC (H.265) | ✗ | ✗2 | ? | GeForce 9004 and newer
VC1 | Radeon HD 4000 and newer, GeForce 83 and newer | ? | GeForce 83 and newer

- 1 Supported by libva-intel-driver-g45-h264AUR instead.
- 2 As of version 0.3, the VA GL driver doesn't support any other hardware decoder than H.264.
- 3 Except GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS (320/640 MB).
- 4 Except GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980.

The features supported by your GPU may vary. To see what your GPU supports see #Verification.

Regarding the amdgpu-pro-vdpauAUR package, see AMDGPU#AMDGPU PRO.

### Software

| VA-API | VDPAU
--- | --- | ---
GStreamer | ✓ (with gstreamer-vaapi, see GStreamer#Hardware acceleration) | ✓ (with gst-plugins-bad, see GStreamer#Hardware acceleration)
VLC media player | ✓ (see VLC media player#Hardware acceleration support) | ✓ (see VLC media player#Hardware acceleration support)
mpv | ✓ (see mpv#Hardware Decoding) | ✓ (see mpv#Hardware Decoding)
MPlayer | ✓ (with mplayer-vaapiAUR, see MPlayer#Enabling VA-API) | ✓ (see MPlayer#Enabling VDPAU)
Flash | ✓ (with libvdpau-va-gl, see Flash#Configuration) | ✓ (see Flash#Configuration)
Kodi | ✓ | ✓
Firefox | ✗ [2] [3] [4]

## Installation

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: The AMDGPU driver is not mentioned. (Discuss in Talk:Hardware video acceleration#)

The choice varies depending on your video card vendor:

- For Intel Graphics use VA-API.
- For NVIDIA cards use VDPAU.
- For AMD cards you can use both (with mesa). The difference is really only in the application implementation [5].

There are also two specific types of drivers for VA-API and VDPAU:

- libva-vdpau-driver, which uses VDPAU as a backend for VA-API.
- libvdpau-va-gl, which uses VA-API as a backend for VDPAU.

For pre-2007 cards see XvMC.

Tip: It is recommended to install and configure both VA-API and VDPAU to achieve support in different scenarios, e.g. Flash doesn't support VA-API but can use the VDPAU VA-API backend.

### Installing VA-API

Open source drivers:

- ATI/AMDGPU Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by either libva-mesa-driver with mesa or libva-vdpau-driver (see #Installing VDPAU).
- Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by libva-intel-driver with mesa.
  - To get better support on GMA 4500 consider using libva-intel-driver-g45-h264AUR instead, see Intel#H.264 decoding on GMA 4500 for instructions and caveats.
- NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by libva-vdpau-driver (see #Installing VDPAU).

Proprietary drivers:

- AMD cards depend on the driver:
  - AMD Catalyst uses xvba.
  - AMDGPU PRO uses libva-vdpau-driver + amdgpu-pro-vdpauAUR (see AMDGPU#AMDGPU PRO).
- NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by libva-vdpau-driver (see #Installing VDPAU).

### Installing VDPAU

Open source drivers:

- ATI/AMDGPU Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by mesa-vdpau.
- Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by libvdpau-va-gl (see #Installing VA-API).
- NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by mesa-vdpau. It requires nouveau-fwAUR, which contains the required firmware to operate that is presently extracted from the NVIDIA binary driver.

Proprietary drivers:

- AMD cards depend on the driver:
  - AMD Catalyst uses libvdpau-va-gl (see #Installing VA-API).
  - AMDGPU PRO uses amdgpu-pro-vdpauAUR (see AMDGPU#AMDGPU PRO).
- NVIDIA GeForce 400 series and newer GPUs are supported by nvidia-utils.
  - GeForce 8/9 and GeForce 100-300 series are supported by nvidia-340xx-utils.

## Verification

Your system may work perfectly out-of-the-box without needing any configuration. Therefore it’s a good idea to start with this section to see it that’s is the case.

Tip: mpv is great for testing hardware acceleration in practice.

### Verifying VA-API

Verify the settings for VA-API by running `vainfo`, which is provided by libva:

    $ vainfo

    libva info: VA-API version 0.39.4
    libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
    libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
    libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39
    libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
    vainfo: VA-API version: 0.39 (libva 1.7.3)
    vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 1.7.3
    vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
          VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
          VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
          VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
          VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc
          VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointEncPicture
          VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice

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

In this example the `i965` driver is used, as you can see in this line:

    libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so

If the following error is displayed when running `vainfo`:

    libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
    vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

You need to configure the correct driver, see #Configuring VA-API.

### Verifying VDPAU

Install vdpauinfo to verify if the VDPAU driver is loaded correctly and retrieve a full report of the configuration:

    $ vdpauinfo

    display: :0   screen: 0
    API version: 1
    Information string: G3DVL VDPAU Driver Shared Library version 1.0

    Video surface:

    name   width height types

    420    16384 16384  NV12 YV12
    422    16384 16384  UYVY YUYV
    444    16384 16384  Y8U8V8A8 V8U8Y8A8
    Decoder capabilities:
    name                        level macbs width height

    MPEG1                          --- not supported ---
    MPEG2_SIMPLE                    3  9216  2048  1152
    MPEG2_MAIN                      3  9216  2048  1152
    H264_BASELINE                  41  9216  2048  1152
    H264_MAIN                      41  9216  2048  1152
    H264_HIGH                      41  9216  2048  1152
    VC1_SIMPLE                      1  9216  2048  1152
    VC1_MAIN                        2  9216  2048  1152
    VC1_ADVANCED                    4  9216  2048  1152
    ..

## Configuration

Although the video driver should automatically enable hardware video acceleration support for both VA-API and VDPAU, it may be needed to configure VA-API/VDPAU manually. Only continue to this section if you went through #Verification.

Note: The default driver names, used if there’s no other configuration present, are guess by the system. However, they are often hacked together and may not work. You can see the guessed values by running:

    $ grep -iE 'vdpau|dri driver' ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log

    (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: radeonsi
    (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2] VDPAU driver: radeonsi

In this case `radeonsi` is the default for both VA-API and VDPAU.

This does not represent the configuration however. The values above won’t change even if you override them.

### Configuring VA-API

You can override the driver for VA-API by using the `LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME` environment variable:

- For Intel Graphics use `i965`.
- For NVIDIA use `vdpau`.
- For AMD use either `radeonsi` or `vdpau`.

Note:

- You can find the installed drivers in `/usr/lib/dri/`. They are used as `/usr/lib/vdpau/${LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME}_drv_video.so`.
- Some drivers are installed several times under different names for compatibility reasons. You can see which by running `sha1sum /usr/lib/dri/*`.
- Since version 12.0.1 libva-mesa-driver provides `radeonsi` instead of `gallium`.

### Configuring VDPAU

You can override the driver for VDPAU by using the `VDPAU_DRIVER` environment variable.

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 set it to the proper driver version depending on your GPU, see #Verification.
- For NVIDIA's proprietary version set it to `nvidia`.

Note:

- You can find the installed drivers in `/usr/lib/vdpau/`. They are used as `/usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_${VDPAU_DRIVER}.so`.
- Some drivers are installed several times under different names for compatibility reasons. You can see which by running `sha1sum /usr/lib/vdpau/*`.
- For hybrid setups (both NVIDIA and AMD), it may be necessary to set `DRI_PRIME=1`. For more information see PRIME.

## Troubleshooting

### Failed to open VDPAU backend

This happens when you use libvdpau-va-gl without overriding `VDPAU_DRIVER`. VDPAU doesn't know what driver to use in this case for some reason and guesses wrongly. See #Configuring VDPAU.

However you may want to configure your media player to use VA-API instead, getting far better results. See #Software.

Categories:

- Graphics
- X server

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