At the end of last year [1]the upstreaming efforts began for a Raspberry Pi HEVC decoder driver for getting H.265/HEVC accelerated decode working on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers with the mainline kernel. Nearly a half-year later that effort is still ongoing but yesterday brought the third iteration of this driver.

The v3 patch series has been posted for this Raspberry Pi HEVC decoder driver for getting H.265 video decode working on these popular ARM SBCs using the V4L2 interfaces. This driver was originally written under contract for the Raspberry Pi company and already in use in their downstream kernel with Raspberry Pi OS while only since last year there's been this effort to get this code into the mainline kernel, as part of their overall effort to enhance the upstream kernel support for these popular ARM boards.

With the v3 patch series there is updated Device Tree bindings, recognizing additional testing that has taken place with these drivers, and other small changes. No really fundamental changes to the driver itself, so hopefully it's reaching the point of being ready for making it into the next kernel merge window.

Those interested in these updated Raspberry Pi 4/5 HEVC decode driver patches can find them on the [2]kernel mailing list .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-HEVC-H265-Decode

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250423-media-rpi-hevc-dec-v3-0-8fd3fad1d6fb@raspberrypi.com/