vlc seems to ignore vaapi/vdpau settings

[Ian Turner]

Under Tools -> Preferences -> Video codecs -> ffmpeg, changing the "Direct Rendering" and "Hardware Decoding" options doesn't seem to actually affect the use of these features.

For example, with "Direct Rendering" turned off and "Hardware Decoding" set to "Disable", I still get this output on the terminal playing an h264 video:

Sun Apr 10 10:44:06 vectro@mirian ^ $ vlc test.mkv
VLC media player 2.2.2 Weatherwax (revision 2.2.2-0-g6259d80)
[0000000002076148] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
libva info: VA-API version 0.39.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0

This is with the following package versions (from Xenial beta 2):
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii ffmpeg 7:2.8.6-1ubu amd64 Tools for transcoding, streaming
ii i965-va-driver 1.7.0-1 amd64 VAAPI driver for Intel G45 & HD G
ii libva-x11-1:am 1.7.0-1 amd64 Video Acceleration (VA) API for L
ii libvdpau-va-gl 0.3.6-1 amd64 VDPAU driver with OpenGL/VAAPI ba
ii vdpau-va-drive 0.7.4-5 amd64 VDPAU-based backend for VA API
ii vlc 2.2.2-4 amd64 multimedia player and streamer

[Brandon Snider (brandonsnider)]

This happens because you have apparently not also changed the video output module away from the default, which is Vdpau. If you select "Automatic", the list is parsed one at a time in the order of the drop-down menu. If you manually selected the next item in the list, XCB, VLC would stop trying to use Vdpau. This is not a bug, it's just that you're trying to tell VLC to use FFMPEG-MT to decode the video, but the Vdpau presentation queue to show it.

[Ian Turner (vectro)]

This seems fixed in vlc 2.2.2-5. With "Direct Rendering" turned off and "Hardware Decoding" set to "Disable", I get no VDPAU output on the terminal.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

This is not fixed. This just isn't a bug, as Brandon already explained.

VLC can use VDPAU not only for hardware decoding, but also scaling and rendering. Thus even if you disable hardware decoding, it still uses VDPAU for rendering.