Intel's VA-API 2.22 Library Adds VVC/H.266 Video Decode Interface

Intel engineers today released version 2.22 of libva, the driver-agnostic library for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Most notable with libva 2.22 is adding a new interface for Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266).

So far we haven't seen any GPU-based video decode support for VVC/H.266 with this video compression format only having been finalized in 2020. Even among CPU-based encoders/decoders for this H.265/HEVC successor they aren't too mature and optimized yet. But with Intel engineers having now added a VVC interface to libva, it looks like GPU-accelerated VVC playback will be arriving with upcoming Xe2 graphics.

The libva 2.22 support just adds the new interface/API around LibVA VVC support while it's still up to the actual VA-API hardware drivers like the Intel Media Driver to implement the interface where supported/capable.

Another notable addition with libva 2.22 is adding support for the Linux DMA-BUF protocol use when running on Wayland.

Downloads and more details on the libva 2.22 release via GitHub.