Bug#1035404: release-notes: Document that VLC 3.x no longer supports VA-API decoding due to ffmpeg 5 transition
Package: release-notes
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
X-Debbugs-Cc: tomman@gmail.com
Dear Maintainer,
With the transition to FFmpeg 5.0, the current stable version line of VLC
(3.0.x) dropped VA-API hardware decoding support due to important changes on
the FFmpeg API, which will mainly impact Intel GPU users:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/26772
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/merge_requests/1245
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021601
Just like every media player using FFmpeg, VLC had to deal with this change,
and they indeed fixed VA-API support... but only on the upcoming 4.0 version,
whose release date is still not set (not even a public beta period has been
announced yet). Since they're focusing their development efforts on VLC 4, they
do not intend to fix VA-API support for VLC 3, which means anyone using VLC
will have to fall back to software decoding (with predictable impact on
performance / power usage), try using vdpau-va-gl as a bridge between VDPAU and
VA-API (this wrapper is known to have stability issues on some setups), or
switch to an alternative media player application like mpv.
This breakage has the potential to negatively impact the experience of those
using VLC as their preferred video player solution on Debian, especially on
Intel IGPs, which are a rather large part of the Linux userbase nowadays. Given
that upstream is unwilling to provide an acceptable solution (especially
considering the current situation of the next major release of VLC), it's
important to at least inform the users to be aware of this problem so they can
act accordingly to have a smoother video playback experience on their Debian
setups.
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