Thanks to work by AMD developers, there is support for accelerated H.264 video encoding with the VA-API implementation in Gallium3D.

Particularly for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, there is H.264 VA-API acceleration in Gallium3D. The 11 patches for this support with the Gallium3D Video Acceleration API were published today by AMD's Boyuan Zhang.

AMD previously supported H.264 encoding on the GPU with Gallium3D via OpenMAX after they provided the open-source VCE video encode engine support. VA-API tends to be better supported by Linux desktop applications than OpenMAX, so this H.264 encoding support there should be a welcomed addition.

Expect the VA-API H.264 encode work to hit Mesa soon.