Experimental RADV Vulkan Video Gets H.264 & H.265 Decode Working

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Experimental RADV Vulkan Video Gets H.264 & H.265 Decode Working

Interest and support around Vulkan Video for adding GPU-accelerated video encode/decode to the Vulkan API has been (sadly) rather slow. But at least the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen some new work around enabling H.264 and H.265 video decoding over Vulkan Video...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Vulkan-Video-H264-H265

[sobrus]

Nice, but since more and more distros are disabling mesa hardware acceleration for both these codecs nowadays (manjaro, fedora, etc) I hope that David won't include a killswitch this time.

It's really not nice to have $1000 piece of hardware and super modern efficient nice API exposed but ... disabled. By open source developers themselves lol.

I guess this is not the freedom that Stallman was thinking about (although I have to admit, that we can recompile it from the source and add support back).

[Danny3]

Great to see Vulkan being used for more things!
Hopefully one day it can be used for everything, gaming, video playback, compute workloads.

[danboid]

Could someone please explain the (potential/future) advantages of Vulkan video decoding over VA-API and VDPAU or will Vulkan video decoding still use one (or both) of these APIs under Linux?

[nanonyme]

Could someone please explain the (potential/future) advantages of Vulkan video decoding over VA-API and VDPAU or will Vulkan video decoding still use one (or both) of these APIs under Linux?

Afaik the intent is this API will be the only video API in the future on Linux similar to like on Windows there aren't competing video API standards. So VA-API, nvdec and VDPAU would gradually go away.

[ranixon]

Could someone please explain the (potential/future) advantages of Vulkan video decoding over VA-API and VDPAU or will Vulkan video decoding still use one (or both) of these APIs under Linux?

Afaik the intent is this API will be the only video API in the future on Linux similar to like on Windows there aren't competing video API standards. So VA-API, nvdec and VDPAU would gradually go away.

Also, this API, at difference of VAAPI and Vulkan, could work in Windows. So is an extra incentive to use this instead of the others, because this is potentially multiplataform

[[email protected]]

Nice, but since more and more distros are disabling mesa hardware acceleration for both these codecs nowadays (manjaro, fedora, etc) I hope that David won't include a killswitch this time.

It's really not nice to have $1000 piece of hardware and super modern efficient nice API exposed but ... disabled. By open source developers themselves lol.

I guess this is not the freedom that Stallman was thinking about (although I have to admit, that we can recompile it from the source and add support back).

Where you heard Manjaro was disabling the support?

[sobrus]

Where you heard Manjaro was disabling the support?

I'm a Manjaro user. They pushed it with the latest stable update, on 6th Dec.

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-update-2022-12-06-kernels-mesa-plasma-cinnamon-nvidia-libreoffice-pipewire-virtualbox/128453

Only AMD cards are affected. At least for now.

Mesa is now at 22.2.4 41

• includes a notable change which disables hardware acceleration for proprietary video codecs (most commonly H.264 and H.265) when using the Mesa drivers stack. Open video codecs (VP8, VP9, AV1 - based on your hardware capabilities) are unaffected and can still be hardware-accelerated out of the box.

[middy]

I'm a Manjaro user. They pushed it with the latest stable update, on 6th Dec.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-u...tualbox/128453
Only AMD cards are affected. At least for now.

that really sucks. this is turning hardware acceleration on linux into a landmine now. each distro is different. i can see projects slowly overtime just dropping hardware acceleration support because they don't know if X distro has it enabled or not and they don't want to deal with bug reports by people saying hardware acceleration is broken.

[sobrus]

As far as I know, only distros that are backed by a company are affected, as they fear to be sued by MPEG LA. And it should only affect US based ones. But manjaro is German and still decided to drop it.

Even though it makes no sense to me, as you still have hardware acceleration for both nvidia and intel, and it ships with bunch of software codecs, including both x264 and x265. So they think they can be sued for providing just an API to fully external hardware codec, but not for shipping software implementing MPEG software patents?
That makes absolutely no sense to me. But this was (please correct me if I'm wrong) actually implemented by David Airlie after a long debate, and more and more distros are following.

I'm a 6800xt owner, and a fujifilm camera owner that outputs high bitrate (200Mbit/s) UHD streams, so this is a bummer for me too.