VA-API AV1 Decode Lands In Mesa 21.3 Gallium3D

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 17 August 2021 at 08:00 AM EDT. 24 Comments
MESA
The change led by AMD engineers for adding AV1 VA-API acceleration support to the Gallium3D "VA" state tracker front-end has landed in Mesa 21.3.

This is the change we talked about last week when the patches were still pending but have now made it to mainline. The Gallium3D VA code now supports the royalty-free AV1 video codec with 10-bit decode capabilities. Of course, it's contingent upon the Gallium3D driver having AV1 capabilities. On the AMD front, AV1 decode is available with the latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series "RDNA2" GPUs.

AMD previously squared away their AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI support code for AV1. Previously they also added AV1 support to the Gallium3D OpenMAX (OMX) code too. The Video Acceleration API though is much more popular than OpenMAX for Linux desktop users so it's great to see that code now in place.

The AV1 code is merged for Mesa 21.3 coming out later this year.

Linux video applications still need to support the VA-API AV1 interface to make use of it. On that front, Intel has worked on FFmpeg AV1 VA-API support as one of the prominent Linux multimedia software packages. Intel for their part has AV1 decode with Tiger Lake Xe Graphics and newer.
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