OpenBSD Now Supports VA-API Video Acceleration

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform.

VA-API is very common in the Linux space among non-NVIDIA GPUs (though for NVIDIA there is the open-source NVIDIA VA-API wrapper project) and supported by a variety of applications for GPU accelerated video playback. Microsoft even mapped VA-API atop D3D12 for video playback with Windows Subsystem for Linux. Support for VA-API on the BSDs has been more limited but finally this month OpenBSD merged its support.

This commit landed VA-API in OpenBSD and explained:

This work was created during the c2k24. With a lot of help and feedback from matthieu@, tb@, and martijn@.

AMD drivers tested by landry@, martijn@, kn@, op@ and a few more Intel driver tested by matthieu@ and me.

The Intel drivers can find in ports graphics/intel-media-driver and graphics/intel-vaapi-driver. (Depending on your hw)

The ports will be adjusted over time.

Everyone has reported fantastic performance results in Firefox or mpv.

Better late than never. OpenBSD's c2k24 was their recent hackathon hosted in Prague, Czech Republic.