VA-API 2.17 Released With Basic X11 DRI3 Support, Enabling VA-API On Windows

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VA-API 2.17 Released With Basic X11 DRI3 Support, Enabling VA-API On Windows

In addition to Intel engineers this past week releasing the newest Intel Media Driver quarterly release, they have also published libva 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Video Acceleration API library that is used across VA-API vendor/driver implementations...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/VA-API-2.17-libva

[Artim]

While it is a good thing to have platform independent APIs, is the future of VA-API actually that bright to even bother or wouldn't it make more sense to just implement the Vulkan video extensions on every OS capable of running Vulkan?

[LinAGKar]

While it is a good thing to have platform independent APIs, is the future of VA-API actually that bright to even bother or wouldn't it make more sense to just implement the Vulkan video extensions on every OS capable of running Vulkan?

Vulkan isn't gonna replace VAAPI, at least not for general media players. Vulkan is a lot more narrow in what it supports. Notably it only supports a handful of formats, while VAAPI will expose all codecs supported by the hardware (except MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 part 2).

Vulkan video could replace VAAPI for applications that only needs the supported codecs though, e.g. games, video conferencing and browsers.

[Artim]

Vulkan isn't gonna replace VAAPI, at least not for general media players. Vulkan is a lot more narrow in what it supports. Notably it only supports a handful of formats, while VAAPI will expose all codecs supported by the hardware (except MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 part 2).

That's only a problem of the current state as work on it has merely begun, so devs concentrate on what's actually important. That's why they have only implement h.264 and h.265 yet and are now working on adding AV1. Those three will be the most important ones in the coming years. When the important stuff is done, they might add everything else that has hardware acceleration.

That's what's called future-proof. Also, Vulkan already exists on Windows and Android, so it doesn't need to be ported first. There just need to be somebody that adds those extensions.

[microcode]

Vulkan isn't gonna replace VAAPI, at least not for general media players. Vulkan is a lot more narrow in what it supports. Notably it only supports a handful of formats, while VAAPI will expose all codecs supported by the hardware (except MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 part 2).

Vulkan video could replace VAAPI for applications that only needs the supported codecs though, e.g. games, video conferencing and browsers.

Accelerating MPEG-1 decoding is a hilariously niche task today, and MPEG-4 Part 2? DivX files used to be a big thing but I haven't seen one for eight years lol.... and even then, CPU decoding was normal when these formats were popular, CPUs now are verymuch up to the task.

When you're making a media player, you can't rely on this alone anyway either. You're going to have FFMPEG or whatever fallbacks regardless. Vulkan Video will expand to support codecs in common use today that can benefit meaningfully from hardware decoding, and seems likely to beat out VA-API over time.

[Hi-Angel]

Fun fact: this release was actually made on 21 December, and e.g. Archlinux package have been using it for some time. But apparently libva folks forgot to add the release to the "releases" page and only did that now.

[joshx1]

Yep. Very confusing as this release has broken VAAPI in chromium for quite a few people