Briefly, this is the VDPAU driver with VA-API/OpenGL backend.
There are applications exists that can use VDPAU. Amongst them are Adobe Flash Player and Mplayer. They both can use VDPAU, but since there is no VDPAU available on Intel chips, they fall back to different drawing techniques. And while Mplayer can use XVideo extension to offload scaling to GPU, Flash Player can not and does all scaling in software. If there was VDPAU available, CPU usage could be significantly lower.
VDPAU is not vendor-locked technology. Even official documentation mentions
possibility of other drivers. They should be named as libvdpau_drivername.so.1
and
placed where linker could find them. /usr/lib
usually works fine.
Which driver to use is determined by asking X server about current driver name or by
using VDPAU_DRIVER
environment variable.
Here is one. Named libvdpau_va_gl.so.1, it uses OpenGL under the hood to accelerate drawing and scaling and VA-API (if available) to accelerate video decoding. For now VA-API is available on some Intel chips, and on some AMD video adapters with help of xvba-va-driver. OpenGL is available, you know, on systems with OpenGL available.
sudo apt-get install cmake libvdpau-dev libva-dev libglib2.0-dev libswscale-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev
mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
sudo make install
- Add
VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl
to your environment
Commands above should work for any Debian-based distro. Fedora names packages in a
different way, so package installation step will look like:
sudo yum install cmake libvdpau-devel libva-devel glib2-devel ffmpeg-devel mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel
.
Note you need to add rpmfusion repo to get ffmpeg-devel
.
Besides VDPAU_DRIVER
variable which selects which driver to use there are other
variables that control runtime behavior of va_gl driver.
VDPAU_LOG
enables or disables tracing. 0
disables, 1
enables.
VDPAU_QUIRKS
contains comma-separated list of enabled quirks. Here is the list:
XCloseDisplay
Disables calling of XCloseDisplay which may segfault on systems with some AMD cardsShowWatermark
Enables displaying string "va_gl" in bottom-right corner of windowLogThreadId
Adds thread id to trace outputLogCallDuration
Adds call duration to trace outputLogPqDelay
Adds presentation queue introduced delay to trace outputLogTimestamp
Displays timestampsAvoidVA
Makes libvdpau-va-gl NOT use VA-API
Parameters of VDPAU_QUIRKS are case-insensetive.
libvdpau-va-gl is distributed under the terms of the LGPLv3. See files COPYING, COPYING.GPLv3, and COPYING.LGPLv3 for details.
Author can be reached at email
ibragimovrinat-at-mail.ru
or at github: https://github.com/i-rinat/