Accelerated Video Playback
This page is meant to help with techniques for getting accelerated video playback working in NixOS. This is generally done via libva and vaapi (and sometimes vdpau).
This is done by adding relevant libva
-related packages to the hardware.opengl.extraPackages
(or hardware.graphics.extraPackages
on unstable) option.
Intel users should enable intel-media-driver
if their CPU is on the supported list (Broadwell and newer). It can be used at runtime with LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD mpv ...
for example, if you use Mic92's mpv settings below.
Other intel CPUs could enable the intel-vaapi-driver
. This may have better results in some cases where the media driver doesn't work. However, this driver is unmaintained.
Additionally, the intel-vaapi-driver
(previously vaapiIntel
) package can be overridden to enable Intel's Hybrid Driver.
Sample configuration:
{
...
nixpkgs.config.packageOverrides = pkgs: {
intel-vaapi-driver = pkgs.intel-vaapi-driver.override { enableHybridCodec = true; };
};
hardware.opengl = { # hardware.graphics since NixOS 24.11
enable = true;
extraPackages = with pkgs; [
intel-media-driver # LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD
intel-vaapi-driver # LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965 (older but works better for Firefox/Chromium)
libvdpau-va-gl
];
};
environment.sessionVariables = { LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME = "iHD"; }; # Force intel-media-driver
...
}
32 bit example:
hardware.opengl.extraPackages32 = with pkgs.pkgsi686Linux; [ intel-vaapi-driver ];
On unstable:
hardware.graphics.extraPackages32 = with pkgs.pkgsi686Linux; [ intel-vaapi-driver ];
Prepared Hardware configuration
Sometimes different opengl packages are required to achieve full performance. You can check different configuration repositories for similar hardware configuration:
Testing your configuration
You can test your configuration by running: nix-shell -p libva-utils --run vainfo
See Hardware video acceleration: Verification (Arch Wiki) for more information.
Applications
Chromium
See Chromium.
Firefox
See Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration (ArchWiki).
MPV
You can place the following configuration in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
for mpv to use hardware acceleration for VP9 on Intel Broadwell (and probably later):
hwdec=auto-safe
vo=gpu
profile=gpu-hq
With Wayland, you need to nudge mpv to do the right thing:
gpu-context=wayland
This is based on the Arch Linux mpv article.
Other
See the Arch Linux wiki.