Intel previously committed an H.265 / HEVC video decoding API to the video acceleration VA-API interface. The Intel VA-API developers have now complemented that by adding a HEVC encode API to this open-source GPU-based video acceleration library.

Intel China developers have landed the HEVC encode API within VA-API's libva library. This implementation is just the interface (700+ lines header file) while the actual implementation for Intel Skylake graphics will come within the actual VA-API Intel driver. The addition of the HEVC encode API happened with this Git commit.

For those wanting to use open video formats, last year Intel added VP8 encode/decode to VA-API but there isn't yet any VP9 support within the Video Acceleration API.