Open-Source Radeon Driver Enables Support For Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 Encode

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265.

David Airlie's five month old patch-set for supporting H.264/H.265 Vulkan Video encoding has now been merged for this quarter's Mesa 24.1 release. Airlie simply commented in the merge request that hit mainline Git today:

This adds vulkan video encoding to radv for h264/5 under the vulkan extensions.

To enable vulkan video encode, build mesa with -Dvideo_codecs=h264enc,h265enc then run radv with RADV_PERFTEST=video_encode

It was with Vulkan 1.3.274 back in December that the video encode extensions were promoted.

Since last year the Mesa RADV driver has supported H.265/HEVC decoding while now encoding is part of the party too. For this quarter's Mesa 24.1 feature release is also Vulkan Video AV1 decode support.

It's great seeing RADV get squared away with its Vulkan Video API support and now here's to hoping more multimedia/desktop software begins allow using this industry-standard API for video encode/decode.