This tutorial is going to show you how to enable hardware acceleration on Intel graphics cards using VDPAU driver.
VDPAU is an open-source library and API allows to video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware. If VDPAU available, CPU usage can be significantly lower.
Applications that uses VDPAU:
- Avidemux as of version 2.6
- Boxee
- GStreamer
- MPlayer
- MythTV
- XBMC Media Center
- XBMC Live
- Xine
- MLT
- Adobe Flash 10.2 Stage Video and later versions (32-bit only presently)
- VLC media player 2.1
VDPAU is not available on Intel graphics cards. Fortunately, there’s an open-source project called libvdpau-va-gl, which is a VDPAU driver that uses OpenGL under the hood to accelerate drawing and scaling, and VA-API (if available) to accelerate video decoding. You can use it on some Intel chips.
Install libvdpau-va-gl via PPA on Ubuntu
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one (Supports Ubuntu 13.10, 13.04, 12.10, 12.04).
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libvdpau-va-gl1
To install the VAAPI drivers for Intel HD Graphics:
sudo apt-get install i965-va-driver
To launch an application with the driver, for example, launch firefox:
VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl firefox
To force Adobe Flash to use the hardware acceleration:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/adobe
echo "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" | sudo tee /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
echo "OverrideGPUValidation=1" | sudo tee -a /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
To enable the driver for system-wide (not recommended):
sudo sed -i "s/^# \[/\[/g" /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20vdpau-va-gl
sudo sed -i "s/^# export/ export/g" /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20vdpau-va-gl
via: libvdpau-va-gl on Github | webupd8
