VA-API

Related articles

• VDPAU
• XvMC

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

Supported hardware

Open source drivers:

• AMD Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by either the libva-vdpau-driver package or the libva-mesa-driver package, together with the mesa package.
• Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-intel-driver package together with the mesa package.
• NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-vdpau-driver package together with the mesa package. It uses the nouveau-fw^AUR 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 libva-xvba-driver^AUR package. It uses the catalyst-utils^AUR driver for Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, and catalyst-total-hd234k^AUR for Radeon HD 4000 series.
• NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-vdpau-driver package together with the nvidia-utils driver.

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-h264^AUR package. See H.264 decoding on GMA 4500 for instructions and caveats.

In order to check what profiles (features) are supported by your GPU, you may want to read the #Verifying section.

Configuration

The driver used by VA-API is autodetected. To determine which one is used see #Verifying. You can override it by setting the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME environment variable:

• For Intel Graphics use i965.
• For NVIDIA use vdpau.
• For AMD use either gallium (for libva-mesa-driver) or vdpau (for libva-vdpau-driver).

The installed drivers are in /usr/lib/dri/.

Verifying

Verify the settings for VAAPI by running vainfo, which is provided by the libva package:

$ vainfo

libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: User requested driver 'vdpau'
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/vdpau_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_35
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 0.38 (libva 1.6.1)
vainfo: Driver version: Splitted-Desktop Systems VDPAU backend for VA-API - 0.7.4
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4AdvancedSimple    : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Baseline           : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD

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

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

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

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.

• VLC media player: see VLC media player#Hardware acceleration support.
• Mpv: see Mpv#Hardware Decoding.
• MPlayer: see MPlayer#Enabling VA-API.