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OBS and FFMPEG VAAPI
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Vindieselwalker Mar 31, 2019
Has anyone successfully recorded gameplay in OBS using the VAAPI encoder? I was happy to see that OBS finally has this available but when I use it instead of x264 my videos are coming out with a lot of lag and freezing. When I switch back to x264 they are fine. I have a 21:9 2560x1080 monitor, i7 7700 & rx580. I thought that using the VAAPI would be like using NVENC. https://tweakbox.mobi/
https://www.happywheels.vip/
skyrrd Mar 31, 2019
There seems to be some builds on arch that are working fine but I haven't tried these. What is did was installing latest git (obs-studio-9999 on gentoo) but I was unable to record anything (failed to create video context or something similar)
Didnt dig any further but am curious how performance is if working correctly
Shmerl Mar 31, 2019
VAAPI was buggy in the past with ffmpeg. Not sure what the state is today. If you see such kind of issues - open a bug about it.
Creak Mar 20, 2022
Hi!

Digging up this thread because 3 years later, I have the same issue as @Vindieselwalker!

Did someone ever made OBS and HW encoding working on an AMD GPU???

Here's my config: I run Fedora 35 (running on X.org because of work) with OBS installed with Flatpak and I use the open source AMD drivers for an AMD RX6700 XT.

If I use the CPU (i.e. x264), it works fine. But if I use the "FFMPEG VAAPI" encoder, I get a blurry, 1 FPS video.

Here's my OBS config:
Shmerl Mar 20, 2022
I haven't experimented recently. Did you try other codecs? Does it work with ffmpeg directly? I.e. may be it's a bug in OBS, not in ffmpeg/vaapi?

Last edited by Shmerl on 20 March 2022 at 5:11 pm UTC
14 Mar 21, 2022
It has never worked for me. I was under the impression GPU encoding was not supported on Linux. I just tried now, and I got an error and it wouldn't even begin recording. It said to make sure my drivers were up to date.
Shmerl Mar 21, 2022
GPU encoding should work through VAAPI in theory, if something doesn't, it's good to open a bug for it in Mesa.
Creak Mar 21, 2022
Quoting: ShmerlDoes it work with ffmpeg directly?
I don't know how to do that using ffmpeg directly
Do you know the command line maybe? Otherwise I'll try and find that on the internets.
Shmerl Mar 21, 2022
Quoting: Creak
Quoting: ShmerlDoes it work with ffmpeg directly?
I don't know how to do that using ffmpeg directly
Do you know the command line maybe? Otherwise I'll try and find that on the internets.

Some examples here:

* https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/VAAPI
* https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/95c9338a737aa36d9bb2931bed379219
Creak Mar 21, 2022
Hmmm... weirdly enough, the ffmpeg package in Fedora (35) is not configured with `--enable-vaapi`.

I don't feel like building my own ffmpeg right now ^^'

Edit: the ffmpeg package comes from `rpmfusion-free`

Last edited by Creak on 21 March 2022 at 4:48 pm UTC
Shmerl Mar 21, 2022
Quoting: CreakHmmm... weirdly enough, the ffmpeg package in Fedora (35) is not configured with `--enable-vaapi`.

Could be the same reason affects the library package that OBS is trying to use?
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