Open-Source GStreamer VA-API Plug-In Support

Our friends at the French-based Splitted Desktop Systems that developed the NVIDIA VDPAU back-end for VA-API and similarly provide an AMD XvBA back-end for VA-API -- that is the only method right now for utilizing XvBA right now -- have furthered their Linux video contributions today. Splitted Desktop Systems has released an experimental set of open-source GStreamer plug-ins that support VA-API.

The gstreamer-vaapi package provides a collection of plug-ins so that this media framework can take advantage of this video acceleration API that's exposed either directly or via one of Splitted's back-ends to most Linux graphics hardware. These plug-ins are fully open-source and support MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1, and WMV formats. This Splitted Desktop Systems code also supports OpenGL rendering through VA/GLX or GLX texture-from-pixmap + FBO.

The release announcement that contains all of the details concerning these open-source VA-API plug-ins for GStreamer can be found on their development list.

Two months ago there was the release of a new Fluendo Codec Pack that provides legal plug-ins for GStreamer at a cost with VA-API and VDPAU support, but now there is this open-source alternative thanks to Splitted Desktop Systems.