Mesa Drops #VDPAU Video Acceleration In Favor Of VA-API

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Drops-VDPAU

Wow, my toot about issues with video hardware acceleration in Firefox really pointed me in the right direction.

Turns out the machine was missing the drivers for H264 codec support.

Fedora removed the patented codecs from their official driver packages in Fedora 37: https://debugpointnews.com/fedora-37-mesa/

> "A recent change in open-source Mesa package config file in Fedora 37 disables the decoding of h264dec, h264enc, h265dec, h265enc, vc1dec via GPU."

It basically fell back to CPU-decoding. And encoding as well, in my case with ffmpeg video conversion and recording.

Bruh.

Fix: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2022-12-03-video-acceleration-fedora-37/

This is what vaapi should look like:

# sudo vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.18.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_18
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.18 (libva 2.18.2)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 23.1.4 for AMD Radeon Graphics (renoir, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.52, 6.4.6-200.fc38.x86_64)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileJPEGBaseline : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc

For reference, this was the before state:

vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileJPEGBaseline : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc

That poor processor 😭

@kernellogger

#fedora #vaapi #vdpau #amd #mesa #amdgpu #patents #h264 #firefox

Je viens de me faire mordre par la bogue #Ubuntu 1927773 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvdpau/+bug/1927773 (en fait, c'était sur Mint, mais même problème) : Firefox peut jouer les vidéos mais mplayer ou vlc n'y arrivent pas ("No backend implementation could be loaded") ou très mal.

Le contournement proposé (export VDPAU_DRIVER=none) marche, mais j'aimerais comprendre et je vais donc poser une question idiote : c'est quoi, #VDPAU et ça sert à quoi ?