For the past few months a Samsung developer has been working on VA-API support for Nouveau. After a few patch revisions, that work is finally hitting mainline Mesa.

Landing in Mesa this morning was NVC0 driver's support for the VA state tracker (Video Acceleration State Tracker) and enabling the support for builds.

In using the VA-API support on Nouveau NVC0 for Fermi and newer, the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=gallium environment variable must be set for picking up the Gallium3D support.

Samsung developers have been working on this code in part for improving Chromium GStreamer playback support.