Microsoft Lands VA-API To Direct3D 12 H.264 Video Encode/Decode In Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Lands VA-API To Direct3D 12 H.264 Video Encode/Decode In Mesa

Microsoft has made a lot of interesting developments and maneuvers over the past number of months for leveraging open-source Mesa for use by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and supporting various Khronos APIs atop Direct3D 12 for use when native drivers are lacking on Windows. This work so far has been focused on OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan but Microsoft has now even implemented Direct3D 12 video API support within Mesa and leverages the VA-API state tracker support within Mesa...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-22.2-D3D12-Video

[tildearrow]

I will be worried if this ends up being more stable/featureful than bare-metal VA-API... (especially on AMD cards)

[Danny3]

In the meantime Firefox's VA-API use on Linux is still broken so hardware acceleration doesn't work!
And it seems nobody cares too much about that, even though this is the default web browsers on most distros and even on Steam Deck.

[Inopia]

Gotta try it out. If WSL2 pans out to be everything promised I could just run all the cross platform software through it instead of installing Windows versions of the software.

[Quackdoc]

I will be worried if this ends up being more stable/featureful than bare-metal VA-API... (especially on AMD cards)

I would hope it get's pretty close. this is a bridge so to speak, it "should" be as featureful and stable as the the lowest points on either side (both of which are pretty good). though I don't have any particular issues with vaapi itself, it just seems that some apps do it better then other apps

In the meantime Firefox's VA-API use on Linux is still broken so hardware acceleration doesn't work!
And it seems nobody cares too much about that, even though this is the default web browsers on most distros and even on Steam Deck.

firefox vaapi seems to work fine for some people in some environments, and not in other environments, steam deck has the luxury of ensuring it works since it is an homogeneous platform. I can't say if it actually does work or not though, I don't have one

[Eirikr1848]

In the meantime Firefox's VA-API use on Linux is still broken so hardware acceleration doesn't work!
And it seems nobody cares too much about that, even though this is the default web browsers on most distros and even on Steam Deck.

Step 1: Type about:config
Step 2: type va
step 3: force enable va-api

[Quackdoc]

Step 1: Type about:config
Step 2: type va
step 3: force enable va-api

thats a good way to make a browser completely unusable for some people, myself included, needed to nuke the browser to fix

[user1]

Does anyone know why does Microsoft put so much effort in all the gui/graphics stuff for WSL? I thought the main point of WSL is simply to have a Unix environment for development purposes.

[arQon]

> This is quite a win for those wanting more robust GUI software support

What?! No, and no. It's a f**king HUGE win, but it has nothing to do with that.

> this support atop Direct3D 12 video technically makes it more robust on Windows than Linux itself.

Not "technically". It IS "better". The only thing stopping it from being even more of an overwhelming victory than it already is, is that pretty much all of the hardware that doesn't have working VAAPI (or at least an equivalent) can't run Windows anyway.

[MihaiBojescu]

Does anyone know why does Microsoft put so much effort in all the gui/graphics stuff for WSL? I thought the main point of WSL is simply to have a Unix environment for development purposes.

Embrace, expand, extinguish. Currently they are at the embrace/expand phase. Why use Linux natively when you can use everything atop of Windows, with probably a better experience?