FFmpeg Can Now Make Use Of VDPAU VP9 Video Decoding

[Nille_kungen]

All Intel Core CPUs starting with Sky Lake support HW accelerated VP9 decoding as well as all NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal. That means pretty much all Intel/NVIDIA PCs/laptops released in the past four years.

The fact that AMD is slow to adapt VP9 is their own issue.

AMD had the support in RavenRigde and looking at the launch date (20171026) AMD has supported it for 2years in laptops, AMD might have supported it later but it's been supported for years now.
All radeon hardware with VCN supports VP9 hardware decoding.

[zoomblab]

How this decoding support is useful to me as a plain user? Does it work automatically and transparently? Does it mean that I can play videos through a player lets say VLC with less CPU? Or do I have to do compiling myself and other arcane stuff?

[castlefox]

I was all excited with this news until I read that my old GTX 700 series card is not support. After doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 19.10 youtube has been rather unresponsive in Firefox. I was having the same unresponsive issue in 19.04 and was wishing the fresh install of 19.10 would fix the problem.

[Gusar]

AFAIK Chromium doesn't use FFMPEG for its VAAPI support. It has multiple decoding backends. The default on Linux is to send everything to FFMPEG for software decoding, the patches you can apply triggers the separate hardware decoding paths.

Well yes, it's not mandatory to use ffmpeg's hwdecode stuff. You can, mpv does for example, but it's not necessary. My point was that just because ffmpeg has hwdecode, that doesn't give applications that use it automatic hardware decoding capability. Even mpv needs code in addition to the interfaces ffmpeg provides.

How this decoding support is useful to me as a plain user? Does it work automatically and transparently? Does it mean that I can play videos through a player lets say VLC with less CPU? Or do I have to do compiling myself and other arcane stuff?

This is only useful if you use the Nvidia proprietary driver and want to use VDPAU. Until now you could already get hardware VP9 decoding on the proprietary driver by using NVDEC.

Open source drivers have had VP9 hardware decoding for a while now via VAAPI. They might add VP9 decoding via VDPAU now, or they might not, doesn't matter, because basically every player out there supports VAAPI.

Bottom line is this: If you use open source drivers, configure your player for VAAPI hardware decoding and you're set. If you're using the proprietary Nvidia driver, configure your player to use NVDEC. VDPAU isn't really a thing anymore, it's still missing features that NVDEC and VAAPI have, mainly 10bit video and Wayland support.

[agd5f]

All Intel Core CPUs starting with Sky Lake support HW accelerated VP9 decoding as well as all NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal. That means pretty much all Intel/NVIDIA PCs/laptops released in the past four years.

Supported on AMD hardware since raven. Everything with VCN rather than UVD.

[aufkrawall]

Supported on AMD hardware since raven. Everything with VCN rather than UVD.

agd5f bridgman Could you guys please have a chat with the Windows driver guys?
VP9 is not normally exposed via DXVA2/D3D11VA, ffmpeg, mpv etc. can't make use of it. It seems to work in browsers though, or at least Edge.
At least it is that way with Navi, I don't have access to a Raven Ridge system. With Nvidia and Intel, VP9 works as expected in mpv etc.

[xtknight]

For those interested, I've started an experimental patch that enables VP9 Profile 0 8-Bit decoding (as much as VDPAU offers) support for the VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper. This allows GPU-accelerated playback of VP9 Profile 0 in chromium with chromium-vaapi for supported cards. Still very experimental, though it allows playback of YouTube 4k videos for me without an issue......so far at least.

https://github.com/xtknight/vdpau-va-driver-vp9