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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Software is not a fast business, VA-API came around in 2007!

Perhaps, but this is just a nightmare intersection scenario: Desktop Linux and hardware acceleration and proprietary drivers.

If you had supported this early, it would've given users nothing but trouble, because of all the bugs. Then again, if nobody supports it, nobody will use it, bugs will not be found and fixed.

Unfortunately this won't be supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It requires them supporting DMA-BUF, which they can't due to those symbols being marked as GPL. Even then, they don't support VA-API.

There is a library that maps VA-API to VDPAU (their other video acceleration library), but that doesn't support DMA-BUF either.

I wouldn't hold your breath that this would ever be supported. It'll probably be easier to modify Firefox to use NVDEC directly, given that FFMpeg already supports that. But I don't think that'll be easy given their reliance on DMA-BUF for composition.

It's not that they cannot use the GPL, they choose to not use GPL for their driver. That's a business decision.

I don't think there is any non open source software involved here, it's Intel only though.

Edit: not so, see below

VA-API works fine on my AMD card using the mainline amdgpu driver. Buy your hardware with software support in mind and there won't be any problems.

Ah, I was going by the WP page. You are right. Also it seems the open source Nvidia driver supports this.

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