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.graphics.extraPackages (or hardware.opengpl.extraPackages until NixOS 24.05) 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.graphics = { # hardware.opengl until NixOS 24.05
    enable = true;
    extraPackages = with pkgs; [
      intel-media-driver # LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD (for HD Graphics starting Broadwell (2014) and newer)
      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:

• The NixOS-Hardware Repository

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.