VA-API's Libva 2.18 Released With Windows WSL D3D12 Support, Optional Disabling DRI3

Version 2.18 of the VA-API library, libva, has been released today for this Linux Video Acceleration API library that is used by the various driver implementations.

Notable with today's libva 2.18 release ios adding the Windows/WS: mapping for using the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver in Mesa for when running on Windows Subsystem for Linux. Microsoft has been working a lot on the video acceleration support within WSL(2) that in turn maps the VA-API to the D3D12 video APIs. Microsoft officially launched video acceleration for WSL back in February after months of improving the relevant open-source code. Now with libva 2.18 they contributed the bits for mapping to their D3D12 driver on WSL.

Microsft demonstrated GPU-based video acceleration with Windows Subsystem for Linux using VA-API.

Also worth mentioning is libva 2.18 adding the LIBVA_DRI3_DISABLE environment variable as an easy mans of disabling Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 usage by VA-API. This is intended for niche/corner-case configurations where using DRI3 may cause problems during video playback and is now easier just setting LIBVA_DRI3_DISABLE=1 rather than having to rebuild the VA-API library without DRI3 support, especially when it comes to testing purposes.

The VA-API 2.18 library update also has various CI updates, a getenv wrapper for Windows Win23 use, and other Windows updates. Some old VA-API Android code was also removed.

Downloads and other information on the libva 2.18 release can be found via GitHub.