Intel today published their official quarterly feature release to their open-source Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux.

Most notable with the Intel Media Driver 2026Q1 is Nova Lake S enablement work. The accelerated VP9 and JPEG encode are now in place and ready to go for NVL-S as part of the broader Nova Lake enablement going on throughout the Linux landscape for these next-generation Intel processors.

The Intel Media Driver update also brings fixes for HEVC decode, AV1 decode, VP9 decode, and media decode fixes in general. This open-source Intel Media Driver continues to support Intel integrated graphics back to Broadwell CPUs while supporting through latest Battlemage dGPUs and next-gen Nova Lake iGPUs.

Downloads and all the details on this quarterly Intel VA-API driver update via [1]GitHub .

Also released today is [2]Intel oneVPL 26.1.5 as their associated VPL GPU Runtime release for their media stack. There is better robustness in the AV1 decode path and various other fixes to this runtime.



[1] https://github.com/intel/media-driver/releases/tag/intel-media-26.1.5

[2] https://github.com/intel/vpl-gpu-rt/releases/tag/intel-onevpl-26.1.5