FFmpeg Adds AMD AMF Vulkan Support For Linux Users

The FFmpeg library up to this point has supported AMD's Advanced Media Framework (AMF) library just on Windows for H.264/HEVC encoding on GPUs. The Windows code-path makes use of DirectX while now AMD AMF support for Linux via Vulkan is now exposed by the latest FFmpeg code.

AMD does offer the Advanced Media Framework for Linux but it's through their Radeon Software / AMDGPU-PRO packages and thus not seeing as much adoption as the likes of VDPAU/VA-API. And even then when using the packaged AMD Linux driver, the user needs to manually install the amf-amdgpu-pro package as it doesn't get installed by default.

It also turns out AMD AMF doesn't support HEVC on Linux but just H.264, at least for FFmpeg's implementation. The AMD AMF Linux support in FFmpeg depends upon Vulkan for initialization.

This AMD AMF Linux/Vulkan support was added to FFmpeg overnight and is also the first time we're seeing Vulkan mentioned in the FFmpeg code-base. That though should change next year with more Vulkan usage by multimedia projects with a Vulkan video decode API being developed.