# VDPAU

Related articles

- VA-API
- XvMC

Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix is an open source library and API to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.

## Supported hardware

Open source drivers:

- AMD Radeon 9500 and newer GPUs are supported by the mesa-vdpau package, available in the official repositories.
- Intel GMA 4500 series and newer GPUs are supported by the libvdpau-va-gl package together with the libva-intel-driver.
- NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs are supported by the mesa-vdpau package, available in the official repositories. It requires the nouveau-fwAUR 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 libvdpau-va-gl package (available in the official repositories) together with the libva-xvba-driverAUR package. It uses the catalyst-utilsAUR driver for Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, and catalyst-total-hd234kAUR for Radeon HD 4000 series.
- NVIDIA GeForce 400 series and newer GPUs are supported by the nvidia-utils package, available in the official repositories.
  - GeForce 8/9 and GeForce 100-300 series are supported by the nvidia-340xx-utils package.

### Supported formats

| Open source | Proprietary
--- | --- | ---
| AMD | Intel | Nvidia | AMD | Nvidia
MPEG2 decoding | Radeon 9500 and newer | —2 | GeForce 8 and newer | —2 | GeForce 8 and newer
MPEG4 decoding | Radeon HD 6000 and newer | —2 | GeForce 200 and newer | —2 | GeForce 200 and newer
H.264 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
H.265 decoding | — | —2 | — | —2 | GeForce 9004 and newer
VC1 decoding | Radeon HD 4000 and newer | —2 | GeForce 83 and newer | —2 | GeForce 83 and newer

- 1 Supported by the libva-intel-driver-g45-h264AUR package, which is available in the AUR. See Intel graphics#H.264 decoding on GMA 4500 for instructions and caveats.
- 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.

In order to check what features are supported by your GPU, run the following command, which is provided by the vdpauinfo package:

    $ vdpauinfo

### Configuration

The environment variable `VDPAU_DRIVER` determines the driver file used. You can enable the environment variable globally or locally per user.

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, you need to set it to the proper driver version depending on your GPU.

You can determine the driver name by running:

    $ grep -i vdpau ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log

    (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2] VDPAU driver: r300

In which case you want to set `VDPAU_DRIVER=r300`.

#### Hybrid graphics

For hybrid setups (both NVIDIA and AMD), it may be necessary to set following environment variable:

    $ export DRI_PRIME=1

For more information, see the PRIME wiki page.

## Supported software

- Adobe Flash Player — see Browser plugins#Adobe Flash Player.

  || flashplugin

- MPlayer or mplayer2 — see MPlayer#Enabling VDPAU.

  || mplayer mplayer2AUR

- gnome-mplayer — To enable hardware acceleration: Edit > Preferences > Player, then set Video Output to `vdpau`.

  || gnome-mplayer

- SMplayer — To enable hardware acceleration: Options > Preferences > General > Video, then set Output driver to `vdpau`.

  || smplayer

- bomi — Hardware acceleration can be enabled: Preferences > Video > Hardware acceleration.

  https://bomi-player.github.io || bomiAUR bomi-gitAUR

- Mpv — see Mpv#Hardware Decoding.

  || mpv

- VLC media player — see VLC media player#Hardware acceleration support.

  || vlc

Categories:

- Graphics
- X server