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VA-API and VDPAU

Created Thursday 23 February 2017


VA-API and VDPAU makes is possible for video cards to decode/encode video and thus offloade some workforce from the CPU. It says that it will therefore save power (by offloading to CPU) but I do seriously doubt that, since it'll just bring an even more power-demanding device into play.


VA-API is for the Intel Driver and VDPAU is for the Nvidia driver.


Installation

# This uses VDPAU as backend for VA-API
$ pacman -S libva-vdpau-driver


# These two packages will make VA-API work as backend for VDPAU
$ pacman -S libvdpau-va-gl libva-intel-driver


Verifying

# To verify VA-API, install libva
$ pacman -S libva


# and run
$ vainfo


# You should get something like below, a driver has been found is it should handle the rest itself

vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver ....


# To verify VDPAU, install vdpauinfo
$ pacman -S vdpauinfo


# and run
$ vdpauinfo


# You should have something like this in the output

Information string: OpenGL/VAAPI backend for VDPAU