Intel FFmpeg 2024Q2 Update Enables GPU-Accelerated VVC Decoding

Intel engineers have been busy preparing their open-source Linux software stack for H.266/VVC video decoding that is expected with upcoming Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage. FFmpeg 2024Q2 is out today with VVC decoding now working on Intel graphics for this widely-used multimedia library.

A few weeks back Intel released VA-API 2.22 with VVC/H.266 support via a new video decode API. Now Intel has posted its quarterly update of their "FFmpeg Cartwheel" that contains all of the company's latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches that have yet to be upstreamed into FFmpeg proper.

With the FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q2 release they have added VVC decode support to FFmpeg using both VA-API (Video Acceleration API) and QSV (QuickSync Video). This VVC/H.266 accelerated video decoding support is only being introduced with upcoming Xe2 graphics hardware.

The only other mentioned feature for this quarterly Intel FFmpeg feature release is now enabling zero-copy video support between the FFmpeg DNN OpenVINO back-end and the FFmpeg VA-API back-end.

Downloads and more details on these updated Intel patches for FFmpeg via cartwheel-ffmpeg on GitHub.