I’m happy to see Nvidia making progress on Linux support for its GPUs, such as proper Wayland support, VRR and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, there is still a ( big ) nuance with Nvidia GPUs on Linux: VA-API. As much as NVEC / NVDEC is cool and all, lots of apps support only VA-API ( Chromium, E…

And nvidia-vaapi-driver uses NVDEC which depends on CUDA, so the GPU is locked to P2 state

Any updates? nvidia-vaapi-driver doesn’t work for me with VLC, mpv, avidemux, etc. (literally any “hardware accelerated” video application I use) The only way I am able to play my videos back in real-time is using mpv --hwaccel=nvdec [filename], but it’s really limiting :( Edit: I have an Intel i7…

now that mesa dropped support for VDPAU on main, it’s basically guaranteed that no new software will support it, and Nvidia itself seems to not be too interested in maintaining it as it still lacks support for wayland, focusing instead on NVDEC and NVENC. can you guys please reconsider oficial supp…

[image] luanv.oliveira: can you guys please reconsider oficial support for VA-API as there’s already projects like chromium where they decided to explicitly not support any other video api …or at least fix bugs that block nvidia-vaapi-driver from working better (like this one ).

Summary of issues affecting VDPAU and NVENC/NVDEC: VDPAU: No video encode support. No Wayland and DMA-BUF support. Poor application support. Missing VP8 decode. NVENC/NVDEC: Not supported by all applications. Proprietary and only supported on Nvidia GPU. Forces the GPU to P2 state as it depend…

Note that there’s one more option nowadays that may (slowly) start getting more widespread support over time and isn’t nvidia-specific, aka vulkan decode. With mpv it’s mpv –hwdec=vulkan (needs at least >=ffmpeg-7 and a recent mpv – Edit: not sure if vp9 is usable yet, afaik would at least need ffm…

The main issue with Vulkan video is there are only 4 supported codecs: AV1, H264, HEVC and VP9 (decode only). JPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC1 are supported by all other video APIs.

Bumping up this topic. The thing is, VA-API is a part of mesa/open-source drivers, so you know what does that mean… I don’t really know how you imagine VA-API being in proprietary implementations set, but maybe it will somehow work with nvdec as a sort of backend, idk.

VAAPI was firstly developed for Intel GPUs at GitHub - intel/intel-vaapi-driver: VA-API user mode driver for Intel GEN Graphics family which is outside mesa and at GitHub - intel/media-driver: Intel Graphics Media Driver to support hardware decode, encode and video processing. which is still outside…

discord is testing hw accelerated screen sharing with va-api only, nvidia will not be supported as nvidia-vaapi-driver does not support encoding

Proper VA-API support

Graphics / Linux Linux

morgwai666 September 11, 2025, 3:17am 5

…or at least fix bugs that block nvidia-vaapi-driver from working better (like this one).

Topic		Replies	Views
Lack of VA-API Support – GPU Video Decode Issue in Chromium-Based Browsers Linux	0	779	November 11, 2025
What's the situation with vdpau/vaapi/nvdec? Linux	50	35898	November 6, 2025
Are there any plans for VAAPI support for Linux? Linux	0	1211	January 9, 2024
NVidia VA-API implementation v0.0.1 release Linux	2	5473	January 4, 2022
Latest 545 release breaks GPU video decoding in Firefox Linux	7	2195	November 15, 2023
VDPAU Not Functional At 4K Linux	24	9402	April 20, 2018
I think 364.19 broke vaapi on Titan X Linux	7	1599	June 6, 2016
[525.53] mpv does not work with NVDEC Linux	9	5169	November 14, 2022
NVIDIA looking to support Vulkan Video on Chrome Linux vulkan , video	0	310	November 27, 2025
Wayland Support? Linux	26	35354	June 18, 2020

Proper VA-API support

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