VLC and GPU decoding on linux aka Re: Welcome to the Thicket

30 January 2010

Mike Melanson from FFmpeg and Adobe made a great post on hardware decoding APIs, named Welcome to the Thicket.

Once again, it is quite well written, and features an awesome graph:

Path chosen in VLC.

As you might know, VLC 1.1 is quite closer and we have worked quite a bit on the various GPU accelerations.

Windows

On Windows, everything is simple, we use DxVA2.

Linux

On Linux, as you can see the mess on the graph.

VLC has had patches for VDPAU and VAAPI.

We have now decided to only support VAAPI in the upstream source of VLC, and allow VDPAU through the VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper.

So far, it works fine with nVidia cards and some Intel ones.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

Comments

  1. On 15 May 15150, 12:40 by CrazyJoe

    This is one of the best things to come to VLC. Once GPU acceleration is considered stable, I’m sure most people (including myself) will finally be able to use VLC as their sole media player.

    Keep up the good work!

  2. On 4 May 4040, 9:13 by fabriciolelis

    video hardware is a GPU or screen monitor?

  3. On 2 May 2020, 5:21 by JBK

    Yes, this is exactly that :D

  4. On 31 May 31310, 2:15 by afiestas

    So in theory, we only have to implement a crystal HD backend for va-api, right? I’m quite confused because it doesn’t seems really a mess (based on what I can see in the graph). Anyway, thanks for your work! I’ll be able to use vlc also when I can’t use my cpu to watch HD.

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