Intel Open-Source Vulkan Driver Sees New Work On Vulkan Video Extensions

After recently getting H.264 and H.265 video decode working for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver with the current Vulkan Video extensions, David Airlie of Red Hat resumed his prior work on enabling the Vulkan Video extensions for the open-source Intel "ANV" driver too.

Going back to last year David Airlie was experimenting with Vulkan Video for both ANV and RADV. After resuming his work recently on RADV and getting that taking shape, he took another stab at the Intel ANV support.

Airlie noted that the Intel Vulkan Video support isn't as far along as the RADV support and has some issues currently. Airlie wrote on his blog:

"This contains an initial implementation of H264 Intel GPUs that anv supports. I've only tested it on Kabylake equivalents so far. It decodes some of the basic streams I've thrown at it from ffmpeg. Now this isn't as far along as the AMD implementation, but I'm also not sure I'm programming the hardware correctly. The Windows DXVA API has 2 ways to decode H264, short and long. I believe but I'm not 100% sure the current Vulkan API is quite close to "short", but the only Intel implementations I've found source for are for "long". I've bridged this gap by writing a slice header parser in mesa, but I think the hw might be capable of taking over that task, and I could in theory dump a bunch of code. But the programming guides for the hw block are a bit vague on some of the details around how "long" works. Maybe at some point someone in Intel can tell me :-)"

The Intel Vulkan Video code currently resides in his personal Mesa Git repository. Setup instructions and more details can be found via Airlie's blog.