AMD developers have landed their work on supporting VCN video decoding in Mesa. VCN is the new video decode engine with the upcoming Raven Ridge APUs (Zen CPU + Vega Graphics) that apparently succeeds the UVD video decoding block.

We haven't seen many public details yet on VCN but their patches surfaced recently and today have been merged into mainline Mesa. Across the span of several commits is this initial VCN accelerated video decoding support.

Supported codecs by this initial VCN implementation are AVC, HEVC, MPEG2, MPEG4, and VC1. Sadly, no sign of VP9 or other open-source codecs. Applications can then make use of this VCN video acceleration via Gallium3D's state trackers like VA-API and VDPAU.

Raven Ridge APUs are expected to be released before the end of the calendar year.