Wine-Staging 1.7.37 Brings DXVA2 API Support Over VA-API

With Wine 1.7.37 having been released on Friday, the Wine-Staging team spent this weekend readying their own spin of this new development version of Wine.

On top of the new features added to upstream Wine 1.7.37, Wine-Staging 1.7.37 lands a extra features: namely, it adds video acceleration support. Wine-Staging 1.7.37 adds support for exposing Microsoft's DXVA2 (DirectX Video Acceleration 2) support to the Windows applications that in turn is converted to use VA-API.

The Wine developers decided to first closely target a VA-API back-end since it closely mirrors DXVA2, but later there could be support for other back-ends, like NVIDIA VDPAU or perhaps OpenMAX. This initial DXVA2 support in Wine is working for formats like MPEG2 and H.264.

So far this DXVA2-to-VA-API support in Wine is working for Pipelight to play videos. The code is still a work-in-progress but those pulling the latest versions of Wine-Staging can now experiment with this feature. To learn more about the experimental Wine video decoding, see Sunday's release announcement for Wine-Staging 1.7.37.