Finally, Intel G45 VA-API Support Is Available

[gbeauche]

It is just me or this is heavily obfuscated code? 90% of lines are just hex values...

It's precompiled code for the *.gen[456] files. You can regenerate them with intel-gen4as.

[gbeauche]

I got all this running with mplayer-vaapi (using the patch posted on page 1), but it's extremely slow, like maybe 0.5fps. I tried a variety of different H.264 videos in various resolutions, containers, etc and all produced the same results.

MPEG2 acceleration seems to work a bit better, but higher bitrate videos don't maintain audio sync for even a few seconds.

Overall, VA-API on my hardware (glxinfo reports a Mobile Intel? GM45 Express Chipset) appears to be a step back in terms of performance for both H.264 and MPEG2. I've yet to find a single file that plays back better with it than without.

This is on Fedora 15 with the stock kernel (2.6.38.6-27) and Intel driver (2.15.0-3). I wonder if it would work better with a newer driver and/or kernel.

Haihao mentioned the following on the libva list. Maybe give it a try?

You need this kernel patch
"drm/i915: fix user irq miss in BSD ring on g4x" which has been added to
the 2.6.39-stable tree.

[Olangu]

Im confused. Are anyone of you getting this to work?

After loading the new driver vainfo only reports MPEG2 support.

$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.32.0
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.32
vainfo: Driver version: i965 Driver 0.1
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD


I think I have the right graphics adapter:

$ lspci -s 00:02 -nn
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[darkbasic]

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Any update too.

[Olangu]

Any update too.

Okay,

Today on the vaapi-mailinglist:
"No hardware acceleration for H.264 on your system, you should update
your kernel."

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libva/2011-June/000533.html

So I installed kernel from debian-weezy.
Now the vainfo shows H264-entrypoints.

xbmc however crashes and on mplayer-vaapi im hitting the "drm/i915: fix user irq miss in BSD ring on g4x"-bug.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libva/2011-June/000503.html

Will continue to post updates to my progress.

[Olangu]

Any update too.

From the libva mailinglist today there is a hint to update kernel.

In doing so I could finally get vainfo to show the h264-entrypoints. My XBMC crashes upon loading video tho. And mplayer-vaapi seem to hit the DRM-bug. Im investigating further and will post any updates.

[darkbasic]

Did you get it to work? Will it ever be merged to master?

[sasaman85]

Any news here?
So is there any way to make the va acceleration work on linux?

Thanks a lot!

[darkbasic]

*
QUOTE

[stupid character limit]

[const]

y the h264 branch is just slowning down the whole machine. the video plays in a slideshow

unfortunately, that's the status - Intel are lying to us (G4x owners) for several years that they will provide Linux driver with H.264 acceleration then they submitted some initial code for that on May 16, 2011 and afterwards no any further updates or as of now H.264 acceleration with Intel G4x in Linux is not existing in practice.

however, it's interesting that according to Intel there are no such problems and it should work:

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/h264.html