[tagrun]

You can make the same argument for VDPAU. AMD officially supports it, and there is an unofficial translation layer with limited capabilities for some Intel GPUs. Is VDPAU not a vendor specific API anymore then?

Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have their own vendor-specific video APIs, and even when they provide official support for the API of another vendor, it tends to expose a limited subset of the full functionality (like the list of available codecs and encoding features).

You are free to call these vendor specific APIs for what they are or something else, but the reality has been that there is no single video API officially supported by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. This changed with Vulkan Video.

But Vulkan Video isn't just about desktop: mobile devices, Raspberry Pi, etc. are expected to get on board with it eventually, just like they did with Vulkan.

> It's supported by the open source drivers for GPUs from all 3 vendors.

Which 3 vendors are you referring to? Intel, AMD, and who?

> It's just that the open source drivers for Nvidia cards are not very practical and the proprietary drivers only support vdpau and nvdec/nvenc

Why are you bringing up open source drivers, and what is not practical? Both official open source drivers (open-gpu-kernel-module) and unofficial open source drivers (nouveau, through binary firmware) support VDPAU. However, NVIDIA's drivers (open source or binary) does not support VA-API.

[mikepavone]

Nouveau supports va-api on Nvidia. Nouveau is not supported by Nvidia of course.

[tagrun]

What of it? So does nvidia-vaapi-driver. They're third party projects, that's very different from "supported by the vendor", and doesn't change the fact that NVIDIA as a vendor offers no support for VA-API.

By the way, nouveau's support is currently limited and not useful: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/VideoAcceleration.html see Video engine support status table, only old GPUs and no H.265 or AV1 support.

[mikepavone]

> What of it?

It was an answer to this question specifically

> Which 3 vendors are you referring to? Intel, AMD, and who?

I either missed some of the other text in your post or it was added after I started to reply.

> Both official open source drivers (open-gpu-kernel-module)

This is not remotely close to being a complete graphics driver. Most of a GPU driver on Linux is in userspace and there is no official open source user space component.

> Why are you bringing up open source drivers, and what is not practical?

nouveau has never been practical for serious use due to poor performance and mediocre hardware support (as you noted). open-gpu-kernel-module is only practical when paired with a proprietary userspace driver.

Anyway, my original point in all this is that describing VA-API as an Intel vendor specific API is unfair given it has been well supported on AMD GPUs for a long time now and on nouveau it's supported as well as VDPAU (i.e. not very well as you note). I did not intend to imply that it was universal. I didn't even intend to imply that VDPAU is a vendor specific API (though as a decode-only API it's not really a complete replacement).

Intel tried to make va-api the standard for hardware encode and decode on Linux, Nvidia tried to make VDPAU the standard for hardware decode on Linux. Neither was entirely successful. By contrast, NVENC/NVDEC, AMF and the Intel Media SDK (and whatever they replaced this with) never had such ambitions.