NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17, an open source implementation of VA-API on top of NVIDIA NVDEC, has been released, enabling hardware video decoding on Linux systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
The project acts as a layer between applications using the standard Linux VA-API interface and the NVDEC hardware video decoder. This allows Firefox, mpv, VLC, Chromium, and other programs to utilize hardware-accelerated video playback on NVIDIA graphics cards without requiring direct support for VDPAU or CUDA.
The new version focuses on compatibility with modern NVIDIA platforms and bug fixes. Changes include:
- Fixed operation on systems with the GB10 platform;
- Improved compatibility with new NVIDIA driver releases;
- Fixed errors in processing HEVC streams;
- Fixed issues with video buffer management;
- Reduced the number of crashes when playing video in Firefox;
- Improved performance under Wayland;
- Updated compatibility with ffmpeg and libva.
The project is particularly popular among Wayland users and modern browsers, where the VA-API remains the primary mechanism for hardware video decoding. Despite NVIDIA's own VDPAU interface, many Linux applications target the VA-API, making the NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver a de facto compatibility layer for the NVIDIA ecosystem on Linux.
The project code is distributed under the MIT license.
Source: linux.org.ru
