The facts about video codec acceleration on Fedora 37.

The facts about the video codec acceleration on Fedora 37.

There’s been some articles that have gotten the current situation extremely wrong about video codec hardware acceleration on Fedora 37.

Here are the facts:

Fedora 37’s Mesa3d package has split out the video codec acceleration libraries, but it has since started building them again as separate packages.

It only affects users of open source AMD GPU drivers.

It does not prevent playback of those formats if you get the codecs or applications like VLC or Celluloid (mpv frontend) from RPM Fusion, like you’ve always had to do anyway.

If you get applications from Flatpak, they come with a Flatpak of Mesa3d that is unaffected.

You can restore the hardware acceleration in Fedora’s version of mesa3d by installing the acceleration drivers manually with dnf.

sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers

Apparently, Fedora-Legal removed them from the default installation to make it less likely that the MPEG-LA patent trolls would possibly come after Red Hat (IBM) demanding money. But it’s actually not as bad as it sounds. The user can fix it either by installing packages in the ways I’ve mentioned, or using the proprietary AMD driver, which has video acceleration support of its own.

Naturally, I recommend avoiding proprietary drivers and just adding back the libraries or using Flatpaks.

Intel users are unaffected because the video acceleration already doesn’t ship with Fedora, and you have to get the libva-intel-driver from RPM Fusion anyway.

After you install these packages and reboot, you can install the package libva-utils to run the vainfo command and verify that you have hardware acceleration for all of the video codec profiles you expected.