The Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan Video is done and ready, the 1.0 release is out with the Vulkan 1.3.238 spec update and no longer considered provisional.
It's been a while coming, with the provisional extensions going out back in April 2021. It's used for proper hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression using the Vulkan API and could be quite exciting for lots of different uses. Sure would be great if game developers went for it, instead of using various proprietary video tech.
The release today includes the finalised extensions after gathering industry feedback and provides functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.
More codecs are coming though, this is just the start. The announcement mentioned they will release more extensions to provide additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode.
These extensions are final:
- VK_KHR_video_queue: common APIs for all video coding operations.
- VK_KHR_video_decode_queue: common APIs for all video decode operations.
- VK_KHR_video_decode_h264: H.264 decode-specific capabilities and parameters (promoted from EXT to KHR in this final release).
- VK_KHR_video_decode_h265: H.265 decode-specific capabilities and parameters (promoted from EXT to KHR in this final release).
Whereas these are still provisional:
- VK_KHR_video_encode_queue: common APIs for all video encode operations.
- VK_EXT_video_encode_h264: H.264 encode-specific capabilities and parameters.
- VK_EXT_video_encode_h265: H.265 encode-specific capabilities and parameters.
At the Vulkanised 2023 event (February 7-9 in Munich), they will also do a presentation and live demo on Vulkan Video.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Comandante Ñoñardo Dec 20, 2022
I wonder how this can benefit PROTON gaming.
If they can write a wrapper to implement the Windows video APIs using this, then it could help quite a lot for any game that shows video cutscenes!
mr-victory Dec 20, 2022
If they can write a wrapper to implement the Windows video APIs using this, then it could help quite a lot for any game that shows video cutscenes!Now you made me excited. If these Vulkan extensions can make use of distro-provided H.264-H.265 libraries then video playback issues will be a thing of the past. For some distros at least.
Would this be able to solve the VDPAU vs VA-API vs NVDEC problem?
aufkrawall Dec 21, 2022
Would this be able to solve the VDPAU vs VA-API vs NVDEC problem?Better, you can even add Windows and Android hwdec APIs to that list. But with some bad luck, support outside of Nvidia and Mesa drivers will be lackluster. So hopefully future major stable Vulkan versions will be rather strict about it as a requirement (no idea if that's a realistic expectation).
Last edited by aufkrawall on 21 December 2022 at 1:36 am UTC
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