GStreamer-VAAPI 1.16 and libva 2.6 in Debian
Debian has migrated libva 2.6 into testing. This release includes a pull request that changes how the drivers are selected to be loaded and used. As the pull request mentions:
libva will try to load iHD firstly, if it failed. then it will load i965.Also, Debian testing has imported that iHD driver with two flavors: intel-media-driver and intel-media-driver-non-free. So basically iHD driver is now the main VAAPI driver for Intel platforms, though it only supports the new chips, the old ones still require i965-va-driver.
Sadly, for current GStreamer-VAAPI stable, the iHD driver is not included in its
driver white list. And this will pose a problem for users that have installed
either of the intel-media-driver packages, because, by default, such driver is
ignored and the VAAPI GStreamer elements won’t be registered.
There are three temporal workarounds (mutually excluded) for those users (updated):
- Uninstall intel-media-driver* and install (or keep) the old i965-va-driver-shaders/i965-va-driver.
- Export, by default in your session,
export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965. Normally this is done adding the variable exportation in$HOME/.profilefile. This environment variable will force libva to load the i965 driver. - And finally, export, by default in your sessions,
GST_VAAPI_ALL_DRIVERS=1. This is not advised since many applications, such as Epiphany, might fail.
We prefer to not include iHD in the stable white list because most of the work done for that driver has occurred after release 1.16.
In the case of GStreamer-VAAPI master branch (actively in develop) we have merged the iHD in the white list, since the Intel team has been working a lot to make it work. Though, it will be released for GStreamer version 1.18.