Intel has integrated VVC VA-API hardware accelerated decoding support into the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.

With the new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptop SoCs featuring VVC/H.266 video acceleration, Intel engineers have went beyond just providing the driver support to also ensuring prominent open-source software can leverage this new functionality.

Intel previously [1]added Versatile Video Coding (VVC) support to VA-API as the Video Acceleration API. Their open-source [2]media driver supports VVC decode with Lunar Lake . And now we're beginning to see patches for popular open-source software to support making use of VVC VA-API when dealing with said content.

Merged yesterday to FFmpeg Git by Intel's Fei Wang was [3]vvc_dec for a hardware decode API . That was immediately followed by the commit [4]adding the VVC decoder for VA-API . The VVC VA-API decoder is now all in place for the next FFmpeg release or those using this multimedia library via Git.

It's great as always seeing Intel's community open-source contributions that routinely go beyond providing just the hardware driver support but ensuring the Linux/OSS ecosystem is ready to make use of new hardware features.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-libva-VA-API-2.22

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Media-Driver-2024-Q3

[3] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/4dc18c78cd1872a6de0b9640a4c5eca35f5dfbfd

[4] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/e726fdeb0550d121e287fc9c5ee6673ab8f66bf4