Hardware video acceleration

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 (AMF) is an open source framework which allows "Optimal" access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing using the AMDGPU PRO Stack, Developed by AMD.
NVDECODE/NVENCODE - 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 are supported by intel-media-driver.
GMA 4500 (2008) and newer GPUs, including HD Graphics 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#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^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 libva-mesa-driver and mesa-vdpau.
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;
NVDECODE on Fermi and newer GPUs ;
NVENCODE on Kepler and newer GPUs.

ATI/AMD

ATI and AMDGPU open-source drivers support both VA-API and VDPAU:

VA-API on Radeon HD 2000 and newer GPUs is supported by libva-mesa-driver.
VDPAU on Radeon R300 and newer GPUs is supported by mesa-vdpau.

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.

Translation layers

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

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

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.
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 .
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 , which is provided by :

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

In this example the 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 :

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

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 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 is the default for both VA-API and VDPAU.

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 environment variable:

Intel graphics:
- For libva-intel-driver use .
- For intel-media-driver use .
NVIDIA:
- For Nouveau use .
- For NVIDIA VDPAU use .
- For NVIDIA NVDECODE use .
AMD:
- For AMDGPU driver use .

Configuring VDPAU

You can override the driver for VDPAU by using the 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 the proper driver version depending on your GPU, see #Verification.
For the open source Nouveau driver set it to .
For NVIDIA's proprietary version set it to .

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 variable to point to correct driver. See #Configuring VDPAU.

VAAPI init failed

An error along the lines of is encountered. This can happen because of improper detection of Wayland. One solution is to unset so that mpv, MPlayer, VLC, etc. do not assume it is X11. Another mpv-specific solution is to add the parameter .

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 as environment variable or .

Comparison tables

VA-API drivers

Codec			libva-vdpau-driver (VDPAU adapter)	(NVDECODE adapter)
Decoding
MPEG-2		Radeon HD 6000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹	See #VDPAU drivers	See #NVIDIA driver only
H.263/MPEG-4 Visual⁴				⁶
VC-1	rowspan=2			See #NVIDIA driver only
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 8 and newer¹
H.265/HEVC 8bit
H.265/HEVC 10bit	Broxton/Apollo Lake and newer			⁶
VP8				See #NVIDIA driver only
VP9 8bit	Broxton/Apollo Lake and newer	rowspan=2	See #VDPAU drivers⁵	See #NVIDIA driver only
VP9 10bit		rowspan=2	⁶
AV1 8-bit & 10-bit	Tiger Lake and newer		⁷
Encoding
MPEG-2			rowspan=7	rowspan=7 ⁶
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.265/HEVC 8bit
H.265/HEVC 10bit	rowspan=2
VP8	rowspan=3
VP9 8bit	Icelake and newer
VP9 10bit	Icelake and newer

¹ Up until GeForce GTX 750.
² Supported by instead.
³ Hybrid VP8 encoder and VP9 decoder supported by intel-hybrid-codec-driver^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 instead.
⁶ NVIDIA CUDA adapter codec support is in active development and susceptible to change .
⁷ Not guaranteed to work. Requires FireFox 98+ .

VDPAU drivers

Codec	Color depth			(VA-API adapter)
Decoding
MPEG-2	8bit			rowspan=3
H.263/MPEG-4 Visual	8bit
VC-1	8bit	Radeon HD 2000 and newer GeForce 9300 and newer¹
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC	8bit			See #VA-API drivers
H.265/HEVC	8bit		GeForce 900 and newer³	rowspan=6
H.265/HEVC	10bit		⁴
VP9	8bit		GeForce 900 and newer³
VP9	10bit		⁴
AV1	8bit		⁵
AV1	10bit		⁴

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 8-bit streams .
⁵ Starting with driver version 510.

NVIDIA driver only

Codec	nvidia-utils
Codec	NVDECODE	NVENCODE
MPEG-2	rowspan=3	rowspan=2
VC-1
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.265/HEVC 8bit	rowspan=2
H.265/HEVC 10bit
VP8		rowspan=4
VP9 8bit
VP9 10bit
AV1 8bit & 10bit	Ampere and newer³

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	NVDECODE	VA-API	NVENCODE	Documentation
FFmpeg						FFmpeg#Hardware video acceleration
GStreamer	¹			¹		GStreamer#Hardware video acceleration
Kodi						Kodi#Hardware video acceleration
mpv						mpv#Hardware video acceleration
VLC media player						VLC media player#Hardware video acceleration
MPlayer	²					MPlayer#Hardware video acceleration
Flash	³	³				Browser plugins#Adobe Flash Player
Chromium	⁴			⁴		Chromium#Hardware video acceleration
Firefox						Firefox#Hardware video acceleration
GNOME/Web	colspan=3			GNOME/Web#Video

¹ GStreamer uses a whitelist of VA-API drivers. To ignore the whitelist, see GStreamer#Ignore driver whitelist.
² VA-API support provided by mplayer-vaapi^AUR instead.
³ VDPAU is supported only by NPAPI plugin. PPAPI plugin to NPAPI browser experimental adapter is available that provides partial VA-API and VDPAU acceleration.
⁴ Xorg only. Wayland is not supported. XWayland exhibits choppiness .

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