#HARDWARE DRIVERS FOR UBUNTU FULL#

You can find a full report of whether or not VA-API or VDPAU are functional, and what codecs they support, by installing the vainfo and vdpauinfo packages and running their commands.

#HARDWARE DRIVERS FOR UBUNTU DRIVER#

Applications in Debian's main archive including FFmpeg (starting with libavcodec58 7:4.4.1-2) and users of FFmpeg's libraries will load the libraries from the non-free driver if they are available. These are only non-free runtime libraries, however. NVENC is supported by the libnvidia-encode1 package.įor the legacy drivers, instead choose either the libnvidia-legacy-340xx-encode1 or libnvidia-legacy-390xx-encode1 package. NVDEC is supported by the libnvcuvid1 package.įor the legacy drivers, instead choose the libnvidia-legacy-304xx-nvcuvid1, libnvidia-legacy-340xx-nvcuvid1, or libnvidia-legacy-390xx-nvcuvid1 package. Otherwise, if you're using a legacy driver, choose the appropriate package from the following: nvidia-legacy-304xx-vdpau-driver, nvidia-legacy-340xx-vdpau-driver, nvidia-legacy-390xx-vdpau-driver

#HARDWARE DRIVERS FOR UBUNTU INSTALL#

If you installed the latest drivers via the nvidia-driver package, then you can simply install the nvidia-vdpau-driver package.

To enable VDPAU support for the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, you must choose the relevant package for your driver version. If possible, you are heavily recommended to use VA-API instead with Intel.

However, this has severe stability issues and may not work at all on some Intel devices. This will also enable VDPAU support over the OpenGL/VA-API backend for Intel GPUs. To enable VDPAU support for the AMD drivers ( radeon and amdgpu), along with the open-source Nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards, install the vdpau-driver-all package. It's not supported in any major browser except for GNOME Web but is useful for local playback. Particularly, anyone using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. VDPAU faces considerably more limitations compared to VA-API, but nonetheless, it's the only option for some users.

#HARDWARE DRIVERS FOR UBUNTU HOW TO#

See EnvironmentVariables for more details on how to set this environment variable system-wide or per user. If both drivers are installed, the newer driver from intel-media-va-driver is preferred over i965-va-driver (since Debian 11/Bullseye).ĭriver selection can be overridden by setting the environment variable LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME to a specific driver, e.g., LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965 (to use the driver from i965-va-driver on Bullseye) or LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD (to use the driver from intel-media-va-driver on Debian 10/Buster). 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.

#HARDWARE DRIVERS FOR UBUNTU SOFTWARE#

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.

Hardware drivers for ubuntu