Intel Bumps libva: Android & Sandy Bridge Friendly

Intel has now bumped the libva (VA-API) library to version 1.0.7. Why this is worth mentioning is that this now makes it possible to utilize GPU-driven VA-API video decoding on Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors.

The libva 1.0.7 release also has better Google Android support for VA-API, and bug-fixes. The previous libva release (v1.0.6) was christened at the end of October.

This VA-API library release doesn't support Sandy Bridge video encoding, which is supposedly being worked on for release this quarter to complement the video decoding.

With the release of libva 1.0.7 and yesterday's Linux 2.6.37 kernel release, now all that those owners of the new Intel hardware need is the official release of Mesa 7.10 and xf86-video-intel 2.14.0, both of which are going to be out there in the coming days but for now are available via Git. For many Linux users though it's not an issue of using Git versus a source tar-ball, but rather the headache and time of building the Linux graphics stack from source without potentially borking your system.

Next week I'll hopefully have the Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel for being the first publication to deliver the Intel Linux graphics results with others being very frustrated over the matter.