Earlier this month AMD developers landed VCN-powered video encode support for the HEVC main format while now this has come to the UVD engine so it will work with pre-Raven GPUs.

VCN "Video Core Next" is the new unified video encode/decode block found so far just on Raven Ridge APUs. That VCN support has been getting into Mesa while AMD's James Zhu this week enabled UVD-based encode for the HEVC main profile.

The patches had been floating around on the Mesa mailing list for a few weeks but have now been merged and flipped on for those interested in GPU-based HEVC/H.265 main profile encoding using the UVD block.

Hardware-wise, it appears this implementation should work with Carrizo APUs. Fiji GPUs and newer. If you try it out, make sure you are also using the latest firmware files for your GPU.

These Mesa changes will be present for next quarter's Mesa 18.1 release along with a whole lot more for advancing the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack.