Hardware video acceleration

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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.
Advanced Media Framework SDK (AMF) is an open source framework which allows "Optimal" access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing using the AMDGPU PRO Stack, Developed by AMD.
NVDEC/NVENC - NVIDIA's proprietary APIs for hardware video acceleration, used by NVIDIA GPUs from Fermi onwards.

For comprehensive overview of driver and application support see #Comparison tables.

Installation

Intel

Intel graphics open-source drivers support VA-API:

HD Graphics series starting from Broadwell (2014) and newer (e.g. Intel Arc) are supported by intel-media-driver.
GMA 4500 (2008) up to Coffee Lake (2017) are supported by libva-intel-driver.
GMA 4500 H.264 decoding is supported by libva-intel-driver-g45-h264^AUR, see Intel graphics#Hardware accelerated H.264 decoding on GMA 4500.
Haswell Refresh to Skylake VP9 decoding and Broadwell to Skylake hybrid VP8 encoding is supported by intel-hybrid-codec-driver-git^AUR.
Skylake or later also need linux-firmware.

Also see VAAPI supported hardware and features.

NVIDIA

Nouveau open-source driver supports both VA-API and VDPAU:

GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs up until GeForce GTX 750 are supported by mesa.
Requires nouveau-fw^AUR firmware package, presently extracted from the NVIDIA binary driver.

NVIDIA proprietary driver supports via nvidia-utils:

VDPAU on GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs;
NVDEC on Fermi and newer GPUs [1];
NVENC on Kepler and newer GPUs.

AMD/ATI

AMD and ATI open-source drivers support both VA-API and VDPAU via mesa:

VA-API on Radeon HD 2000 and newer GPUs.
VDPAU on Radeon R600 and newer GPUs.

AMDGPU PRO proprietary driver is built on top of AMDGPU driver and supports both VA-API and VDPAU in addition to AMF.

AMF on Fiji and newer GPUs supported by amf-amdgpu-pro^AUR.

Note:

You may need to force your application to use AMDGPU PRO Vulkan Driver.
HEVC encoding may not be available on GPUs older than Navi.

Translation layers

libva-vdpau-driver — A VDPAU-based backend for VA-API.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/vaapi/vdpau-driver || libva-vdpau-driver, libva-vdpau-driver-vp9-git^AUR

libvdpau-va-gl — VDPAU driver with OpenGL/VAAPI backend. H.264 only.

https://github.com/i-rinat/libvdpau-va-gl || libvdpau-va-gl

nvidia-vaapi-driver — A CUDA NVDEC based backend for VA-API.

https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/ || libva-nvidia-driver

Note:

Series 525 and later of the NVIDIA driver introduced a regression, breaking VA-API. Use the direct-backend.
The code for libva-vdpau-driver has not been touched for years. As a result, it crashes when running VLC or OBS with recent versions of the NVIDIA driver. [2] If you need a translation layer for NVIDIA drivers, use libva-nvidia-driver instead.

Verification

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

Tip:

mpv with its command-line support is great for testing hardware acceleration. Look at the log of mpv --hwdec=auto video_filename and see hwdec for more details.
Use nvtop to check "DEC" (decoder) usage on the top lines while playing a video, for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA.
For Intel GPU, use intel-gpu-tools and run intel_gpu_top as root to monitor the GPU activity during video playback for example. The video bar being above 0% indicates GPU video decoder/encoder usage.
For AMD GPU, use radeontop to monitor GPU activity. Unlike intel-gpu-tools, there is currently no way to see decode/encode usage on radeontop [3].
For any GPU, you can compare CPU usage with a tool like htop. Especially for higher resolution videos (4k+), CPU usage when VA-API is enabled and working should be dramatically lower on laptops and other relatively low-power devices.

Verifying VA-API

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

$ 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:

vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 1.7.3

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.

The default driver names, used if there is no other configuration present, are guessed by the system. However, they are often hacked together and may not work. The guessed value will be printed in the Xorg log file, which is ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log if rootless, or /var/log/Xorg.0.log if Xorg is running as root. To search the log file for the values of interest:

$ grep -iE 'vdpau | dri driver' xorg_log_file

(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.

Note: If you use GDM, run journalctl -b --grep='vdpau | dri driver' as root instead.

This does not represent the configuration however. The values above will not 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:

Intel graphics:
- For libva-intel-driver use i965.
- For intel-media-driver use iHD.
NVIDIA:
- For Nouveau use nouveau.
- For NVIDIA VDPAU use vdpau.
- For NVIDIA NVDEC use nvidia.
AMD:
- For AMDGPU driver use radeonsi.

Note:

You can find the installed drivers in /usr/lib/dri/. They are used as /usr/lib/dri/${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/* | sort.
LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH can be used to overrule the VA-API drivers location.
Since version 12.0.1 Mesa 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 you need to set it to va_gl.
For the open source AMD driver set it to radeonsi.
For the open source Nouveau driver set it to nouveau.
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 the DRI_PRIME environment variable. For more information see PRIME.

Configuring applications

Multimedia frameworks:

Video players:

Web browsers:

Multimedia recording/streaming:

Open Broadcaster Software#Hardware video acceleration

Troubleshooting

Failed to open VDPAU backend

You need to set VDPAU_DRIVER variable to point to correct driver. See #Configuring VDPAU.

VAAPI init failed

An error along the lines of libva: /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so init failed is encountered. This can happen because of improper detection of Wayland. One solution is to unset $DISPLAY so that mpv, MPlayer, VLC, etc. do not assume it is X11. Another mpv-specific solution is to add the parameter --gpu-context=wayland.

This error can also occur if you installed the wrong VA-API driver for your hardware.

Video decoding corruption or distortion with AMDGPU driver

When experiencing video decoding corruption or distortion with AMDGPU driver, set allow_rgb10_configs=false as an environment variable. [4]

Comparison tables

VA-API drivers

Codec	libva-intel-driver [5]	intel-media-driver [6]	mesa [7] [8]	libva-vdpau-driver (VDPAU adapter)	libva-nvidia-driver (NVDEC adapter)
Decoding
MPEG-2	GMA 4500 and newer	Broadwell and newer	Radeon HD 6000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹	See #VDPAU drivers	See #NVIDIA driver only
H.263/MPEG-4 Visual⁴	No	No	Radeon HD 6000 and newer
VC-1	Sandy Bridge and newer	Broadwell and newer	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 9300 and newer¹
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC	GMA 4500², Ironlake and newer	Broadwell and newer	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹
H.265/HEVC 8bit	Cherryview/Braswell and newer	Skylake and newer	Radeon R9 Fury and newer
H.265/HEVC 10bit	Broxton and newer	Broxton/Apollo Lake and newer	Radeon 400 and newer
VP8	Broadwell and newer	Broadwell and newer	No	No
VP9 8bit	Broxton and newer Hybrid: Haswell refresh to Skylake³	Broxton/Apollo Lake and newer	Raven Ridge + Radeon RX 5000 and newer	See #VDPAU drivers⁵
VP9 10bit & 12bit	Kaby Lake and newer	Kaby Lake and newer	Raven Ridge + Radeon RX 5000 and newer	No
AV1 8bit & 10bit	No	Tiger Lake and newer	Radeon RX 6600 and higher/newer	No
Encoding
MPEG-2	Ivy Bridge and newer	Broadwell and newer except Broxton/Apollo Lake	No	–	No⁶
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC	Sandy Bridge and newer	Broadwell and newer	Radeon HD 7000 and newer
H.265/HEVC 8bit	Skylake and newer	Skylake and newer	Radeon 400 and newer
H.265/HEVC 10bit	Kaby Lake and newer	Kaby Lake and newer	Raven Ridge + Radeon RX 5000 and newer
VP8	Cherryview/Braswell and newer Hybrid: Haswell to Skylake³	Kaby Lake and newer	No
VP9 8bit	Kaby Lake and newer	Icelake and newer
VP9 10bit & 12bit	No	Icelake and newer
AV1 8bit & 10bit	No	Alchemist and newer	Radeon RX 7900 and higher/newer

¹ Up until GeForce GTX 750.
² Supported by libva-intel-driver-g45-h264^AUR instead.
³ Hybrid VP8 encoder and VP9 decoder supported by intel-hybrid-codec-driver-git^AUR.
⁴ MPEG-4 Part 2 is disabled by default due to VAAPI limitations. Set the environment variable VAAPI_MPEG4_ENABLED=true to try to use it anyway.
⁵ Experimental VP9 support provided by libva-vdpau-driver-vp9-git^AUR instead.
⁶ NVIDIA CUDA adapter codec support is in active development and susceptible to change [9].

VDPAU drivers

Codec	Color depth	mesa [10] [11]	nvidia-utils	libvdpau-va-gl (VA-API adapter)
Decoding
MPEG-2	8bit	Radeon R600 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹	GeForce 8 and newer	No
H.263/MPEG-4 Visual	8bit	Radeon HD 6000 and newer GeForce 200 and newer¹	GeForce 200 and newer
VC-1	8bit	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 9300 and newer¹	GeForce 8 and newer²
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC	8bit	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹	GeForce 8 and newer	See #VA-API drivers
H.265/HEVC	8bit	Radeon R9 Fury and newer	GeForce 900 and newer³	No
H.265/HEVC	10bit	Radeon 400 and newer	No⁴
VP9	8bit	Raven Ridge + Radeon RX 5000 and newer	GeForce 900 and newer³
VP9	10bit/12bit	Raven Ridge + Radeon RX 5000 and newer	No⁴
AV1	8bit	Radeon RX 6600 and higher/newer	GeForce 30 and newer⁵
AV1	10bit	Radeon RX 6600 and higher/newer	No⁴

¹ Up until GeForce GTX 750.
² Except GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS (320/640 MB).
³ Except GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980.
⁴ NVIDIA implementation is limited to 8bit streams [12] [13].
⁵ Starting with driver version 510.[14]

NVIDIA driver only

Codec	nvidia-utils [15]
Codec	NVDEC	NVENC
MPEG-2	Fermi and newer¹	No
VC-1		No
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC		Kepler and newer²
H.265/HEVC 8bit	Maxwell (GM206) and newer	Maxwell (2nd Gen) and newer
H.265/HEVC 10bit	Maxwell (GM206) and newer	Pascal and newer
VP8	Maxwell (2nd Gen) and newer	No
VP9 8bit	Maxwell (GM206) and newer
VP9 10bit & 12bit	Pascal and newer
AV1 8bit & 10bit	Ampere and newer³	Ada Lovelace and newer

¹ Except GM108 (not supported)
² Except GM108 and GP108 (not supported)
³ Except A100 (not supported)

Application support

Application	Decoding			Encoding		Documentation
Application	VA-API	VDPAU	NVDEC	VA-API	NVENC	Documentation
FFmpeg	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	FFmpeg#Hardware video acceleration
GStreamer	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	GStreamer#Hardware video acceleration
Kodi	Yes	Yes	No	–	–	Kodi#Hardware video acceleration
mpv	Yes	Yes	Yes	–	–	mpv#Hardware video acceleration
VLC media player	Yes	Yes	No	–	–	VLC media player#Hardware video acceleration
MPlayer	Yes¹	Yes	No	–	–	MPlayer#Hardware video acceleration
Flash	No²	Yes²	No	–	–	Browser plugins#Adobe Flash Player
Chromium	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Chromium#Hardware video acceleration
Firefox	Yes	No	No	No	No	Firefox#Hardware video acceleration
GNOME/Web	GStreamer			?	?	GNOME/Web#Video

¹ VA-API support provided by mplayer-vaapi^AUR instead.
² VDPAU is supported only by NPAPI plugin. PPAPI plugin to NPAPI browser experimental adapter is available that provides partial VA-API and VDPAU acceleration.