Tear-Free, Hardware-Accelerated Video On Wayland

Kristian Høgsberg has demonstrated that tear-free video playback on Wayland is a reality and that running Wayland on Intel hardware does allow for hardware-accelerated video playback thanks to VA-API support.

Høgsberg was presenting yesterday in San Diego at the GStreamer Conference concerning Wayland and Weston. With this being a conference filled mostly with GStreamer multimedia framework developers and stakeholders, he also talked about video playback support on Wayland and GStreamer support.

My notes from Kristian's presentation were already posted yesterday while below is a video showing Kristian's demo of Intel VA-API video acceleration working for tear-free hardware-accelerated video playback under Wayland with the reference Weston compositor and shell.

Intel OTC developers have been working for months on Wayland VA-API support and now with the very latest code along with libva for the VA-API library, it's possible to benefit from hardware-accelerated video decoding under Wayland. Kristian was doing this Wayland video playback from his laptop with Intel Sandy Bridge hardware.

Rob Clark of Texas Instruments also had an experimental Wayland demo from the GStreamer Conference when running Wayland/Weston on low-power ARM hardware.