NVIDIA VA-API 0.0.6 Driver Works On Multi-Threaded Decode, Improved GPU Selection

The open-source, unofficial project providing a NVIDIA VA-API driver on Linux systems built atop the proprietary driver's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new feature release. This NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver effort continues to be driven in large part for allowing GPU-accelerated video acceleration in Firefox and other software only targeting the open Video Acceleration API.

The nvidia-vaapi-driver project continues marching along for implementing VA-API atop NVDEC with particular emphasis on Firefox video support. This NVIDIA VA-API implementation works currently for H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP8, VP9, MPEG-2, and VC-1. There also remains experimental AV1 support too for use with newer NVIDIA RTX 30 graphics cards.

NVIDIA's Linux driver has long been focused on the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) or more recently their cross-platform NVDEC interface. For software like Firefox only targeting the vendor-independent VA-API, this open-source project comes to the rescue for NVIDIA Linux customers.

With today's nvidia-vaapi-driver 0.0.6 release there is multi-threaded decode where the final processing steps are punted off to a separate thread, improved GPU selection and honoring the "NVD_GPU" environment variable for selecting among multiple NVIDIA GPUs, an option to limit the maximum instances per-process, and a variety of other fixes and low-level improvements.

Downloads and more details on the v0.0.6 release for this unofficial NVIDIA VA-API driver implementation via GitHub.