For the past few months a developer at Samsung has been working on VA-API support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Those patches today are up to their fifth revision.

Julien Isorce of Samsung today posted v5 of these enablement patches to allow the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) state tracker to work for the open-source Nouveau driver supporting NVIDIA graphics cards. The VDPAU state tracker already supports Nouveau, but this is opening up Nouveau video acceleration to more applications with those just targeting the VA-API interface that's backed by Intel.

With v5 of these fixes, H.264 acceleration is now working alongside MPEG, VC1, and MPEG4. Testing was done in conjunction with the MPV player.

More details on the pending Nouveau VA-API support can be found via this Mesa patch series.