Libav & FFmpeg Add New Libmfx-based Decoders For H.265 + MPEG2

The FFmpeg project and its forked Libav have added support for new video decoders based on libmfx, technology from the Intel Media SDK.

Libmfx is part of Intel's Media SDK as a dispatch interface for video encode/decode that's supported on both Windows and Linux. Under Linux, libmfx in turn interfaces with VA-API for doing the video encode/decode on the Intel HD Graphics hardware of recent generations.

FFmpeg has supported libmfx for some time along with Libav and initially it was for H.264 encode/decode. As of this week there is now libmfx-based support in both FFmpeg and Libav for MPEG2 decoding and HEVC / H.265 decoding.

FFmpeg/Libav currently support VA-API usage directly for H.263, H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC1, and WMV3. Of course, for non-Intel users there is the wonderful VDPAU support for video decoding by Gallium3D and the NVIDIA proprietary driver.