Intel VA-API Driver 1.6 Is Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel VA-API Driver 1.6 Is Coming

Some Video Acceleration API updates are coming down the pipe...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-VA-API-1.6

[Creak]

About all these video acceleration APIs (VA-API, etc...), I see a lot of news about it, but, in the end, I still have impressive tearings in my HTML5 Youtube videos... Is it normal?

[mark45]

About all these video acceleration APIs (VA-API, etc...), I see a lot of news about it, but, in the end, I still have impressive tearings in my HTML5 Youtube videos... Is it normal?

I don't know, but there's 2 things: decoding and presenting the video.
Afaik on Nvidia in Firefox on Linux Adobe Flash decodes the video with VDPAU but is drawn (presented) by Firefox itself (using the CPU). Btw WebGL is also drawn with the GL driver but presented (copied) with the CPU which is why any WebGL animation always takes 10+% CPU.
Afaik on Linux all HTML5 browsers (Chromium, FF) present the video using the CPU, not GPU. If they didn't tackle such an important thing no wonder it also tears.

[Gusar]

About all these video acceleration APIs (VA-API, etc...), I see a lot of news about it, but, in the end, I still have impressive tearings in my HTML5 Youtube videos... Is it normal?

As mark45 already mentioned, browsers, at least in Linux, do HTML5 video in software. While in theory you could use gstreamer-vaapi for hardware decoding, in practice this won't gain you anything, as the decoded video will be copied back to system RAM (which takes resources and basically negates the advantage of hardware decoding), and then presentation will be done in software.

mark45 is incorrect in one thing though, using Flash with VDPAU, both decoding and presentation will be done in hardware if you set EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1 in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg (you can check this on Youtube by right-clicking the video and selecting Stats for nerds, it will show how both presentation and decoding are being done). Though it's possible Firefox does further messing with the stuff once Flash is done with it.

Basically, video playback in the browser is really, really poor still. I'd avoid it as much as possible. The video APIs (VDPAU, VAAPI) shine in dedicated media players. Even here there's differences in efficiency, for example VLC supports zero-copy (no copying back into system RAM) only with VDPAU, but not with VAAPI.

[e8hffff]

258
Excellento. I run off an Intel Nuc5i5rhy so any improvement in VAAPI is welcomed.

[s_j_newbury]

Chrome/Chromium can use GPU rasterization (see chrome://flags - you might need to disable GPU blacklists) and zero-copy updates, there's also a Chromium VA-API patch to enable the already existing code which is used on ChromeOS, there's an Ubuntu PPA including it. It all works fine here on my custom Gentoo ebuild.

[Gusar]

Chrome/Chromium can use GPU rasterization (see chrome://flags - you might need to disable GPU blacklists) and zero-copy updates

Does that apply to video as well or is it just generic content acceleration? Video presentation requires colorspace conversion (from yuv420 to rgb), media players need specific support for that.

there's also a Chromium VA-API patch to enable the already existing code which is used on ChromeOS, there's an Ubuntu PPA including it. It all works fine here on my custom Gentoo ebuild.

That's interesting. I'll research this and play around a bit. Do you have a handy link directly to the patch?

[s_j_newbury]

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/chromium-browser/chromium-browser.trusty.beta/revision/198#debian/patches/enable_vaapi_on_linux.diff

[Gusar]

Had to modify that patch a bit for chromium-dev-44.0.2403.4, it compiled, but no go:

libva info: VA-API version 0.37.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
[15875:15875:0523/202347:ERROR:vaapi_wrapper.cc(328)] vaInitialize failed VA error: unknown libva error

Maybe I could try a release instead of the dev version, but it takes more than an hour to compile this thing, so I'm not in the mood. Firefox only takes 12 minutes to compile!
Another possibility, Chromium has an internal version of libva, perhaps it's too old.

[Creak]

It seems like the technology is here and already working... Do you know why it is not enabled by default? Is it not stable enough?