The non-free driver can be installed with the i965-va-driver-shaders package after adding a non-free component to your apt sources. You can find the non-free driver in the intel-media-va-driver-non-free package after adding a non-free component to your apt sources.įor older Intel hardware, the free driver can be installed with the i965-va-driver package. The non-free drivers are necessary to encode media while the free drivers can only decode.įor Gen 8+ Intel hardware, the free driver can be installed with the intel-media-va-driver package. VA-API sees broad software support and is even used by default in applications like MPV when it's available.įor Nouveau and the various AMD drivers, support can be added simply by installing the mesa-va-drivers package.įor Intel, it's split generationally, and into free and non-free drivers. Main limitation is limited software and hardware support across the board because of its proprietary nature. Only supported in a few major applications (FFmpeg and OBS Studio for encoding, FFmpeg and MPV for decoding).

NVENC/NVDEC - A proprietary API supported exclusively by NVIDIA.

Main limitations are poor and incomplete Intel support and not working with browsers for web video acceleration. Supported by most desktop applications like Kodi, VLC, and MPV, but has no support at all in Chromium or Firefox.

VDPAU - Supported fully on AMD and NVIDIA (both proprietary and Nouveau).

Main limitation is lacking any support in the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Widely supported by software, including Kodi, VLC, MPV, Chromium, and Firefox. VA-API - Supported on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA (only via the open-source Nouveau drivers). The three main APIs that are in use are VA-API, VDPAU, and NVENC/NVDEC. In at least some relatively typical scenarios, the performance gains of using hardware decoding can be huge, with reductions in CPU usage of around 90%. Historically, the benefits of hardware acceleration under Linux have been uncertain, but it seems likely that support today has improved drastically.

Kodi use smplayer