VA-API

Summary
Explains VA-API support in various hardware and software components
Related
VDPAU
XvMC

Video Acceleration API is a specification and open source library to provide hardware accelerated video decode/encode.

Supported hardware

Open source drivers:

• AMD Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-vdpau-driver package (available in the official repositories) together with the ati-dri driver.

• Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-intel-driver package, available in the official repositories.

• NVIDIA GeForce 400 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-vdpau-driver package (available in the official repositories) together with the nouveau-dri driver. It uses the nouveau-fw 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 package, available in the AUR. It uses the catalyst-utils driver for Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, and catalyst-legacy-utils for Radeon HD 4000 series.

• NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libva-vdpau-driver package (available in the official repositories) together with the nvidia-utils driver.

Supported formats

	libva-vdpau-driver with ati-dri	libva-intel-driver	libva-vdpau-driver with nouveau-dri	libva-xvba-driver	libva-vdpau-driver with nvidia-utils
MPEG2 decoding	AMD Radeon 9500 and newer	Intel GMA 4500 and newer	Nvidia GeForce 400 and newer	AMD Radeon HD 4000 and newer	Nvidia GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG4 decoding	AMD Radeon HD 6000 and newer	-	Nvidia GeForce 400 and newer	AMD Radeon HD 6000 and newer	Nvidia GeForce 200 and newer
H264 decoding	AMD Radeon HD 4000 and newer	Intel GMA 45001, Ironlake Graphics and newer	Nvidia GeForce 400 and newer	AMD Radeon HD 4000 and newer	Nvidia GeForce 8 and newer
VC1 decoding	AMD Radeon HD 4000 and newer	Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer	Nvidia GeForce 400 and newer	AMD Radeon HD 4000 and newer	Nvidia GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG2 encoding	-	Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer	-	-	-
H264 encoding	-	Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics and newer	-	-	-

¹Supported by the libva-driver-intel-g45-h264 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 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.

Supported software

GStreamer

Install gst-vaapi package, available in the official repositories.

$ gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file:///path/to/foobar.mpeg

VA-API is used automatically, if supported format found.

GStreamer based players:

• totem: no configuration needed.

MPlayer

Install mplayer-vaapi package, available in the official repositories.

$ mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi foobar.mpeg

• -vo - Select vaapi video output driver
• -va - Select vaapi video decoder driver

Note: You can also use mplayer2 with VDPAU backend. See MPlayer#Enabling_VDPAU for more information.

MPlayer based players:

• gnome-mplayer: to enable hardware acceleration: Edit -> Preferences -> Player, then set Video Output to "vaapi".
• smplayer: to enable hardware acceleration: Options -> Preferences -> General -> Video, then set Output driver to "vaapi".

VLC media player

Install vlc package, available in the official repositories.

To enable hardware acceleration: Tools -> Preferences -> Input & Codecs, then check "Use GPU accelerated decoding".