VA-API supported profiles and VDPAU on Wayland with AMD Radeon RX6900XT

Support Graphics & Display
1

First of all, thank you for creating such an excellent distro! I replaced Ubuntu with Manjaro a couple of months ago and am highly impressed by stability, ease-of-use and general quality of the distro. I’m definitely a fan of rolling releases and never regretted the change :slight_smile:
Second please take my apologies that I have to create a new thread for my issue but I was google-ing for weeks now and cannot find any solution (or explanation so far). So please be indulgent and tell me openly what I missed. :pray:

I use Manjaro on my main Desktop (Ryzen 9 5950X, Radeon RX6900XT) for everything (no longer dual-boot with Windows since 2019 :partying_face:) and I’d like to know which VA-API-Profiles my graphics card could support. Regarding the official AMD Product Specs (not allowed to post links as a forum newbie), it should support at least H264, H265 encoding and decoding. Regarding vainfo I’m missing these profiles:

vainfo 
local> vainfo
Trying display: wayland
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.17 (libva 2.17.1)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 22.3.5 for AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (navi21, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.42, 5.15.93-1-MANJARO)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileAV1Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc

Regarding VDPAU, I’m absolutely lost as it is not working at all under Wayland.

vdpauinfo 
local> vdpauinfo
display: :0   screen: 0
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Error creating VDPAU device: 1

Is there anyone out there that can confirm or deny that VDPAU will not work with Wayland on my card or can tell me what I’m missing?
Could anyone give me a hint why the H264 and H265 Profiles are currently not supported on my configuration?
I hope that I provided all necessary information. I hid them to keep the thread as small as possible. If that is not allowed or desired by the forum rules, I would be happy to change it immediately.

mhwd-kernel -li 
local> mhwd-kernel -li
Currently running: 5.15.93-1-MANJARO (linux515)
The following kernels are installed in your system:
   * linux515
mhwd --listinstalled 
local> mhwd --listinstalled
> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         network-r8168            2016.04.20                true            PCI
           video-linux            2018.05.04                true            PCI
mhwd --list 
local> mhwd --list
> 0000:2f:00.0 (0300:1002:73af) Display controller ATI Technologies Inc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
           video-linux            2018.05.04                true            PCI
     video-modesetting            2020.01.13                true            PCI
            video-vesa            2017.03.12                true            PCI


> 0000:27:00.0 (0200:10ec:8168) Network controller Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         network-r8168            2016.04.20                true            PCI

For me the driver versions are looking pretty outdated but this is just my personal feeling. I found no way to update that stuff and already read the related pages about video hardware acceleration on the arch wiki which seems to be pretty straight forward but looks like it is all related to X-Server and not Wayland-specific.
Any help to figure out where my brain is stucking in that case is very appreciated.

2

Argh, just a second after my post, I struggled about an article on lwn[dot]net about disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions. Is this related to at least one of my “issue”? :scream:

3

For codec support use mesa-nonfree.
Here is about/install/configure repo.
ArchWiki AMDGPU - ArchWiki

2 Likes
4

Thanks for your hint to mesa-nonfree, this fixed the supported vaapi profiles and I can now stream my games inhouse with sunshine and hardware encoding support :partying_face: .
I read the AMDGPU-Pages in the Arch Wiki again and again, but couldn’t find any reference to these nonfree packages. Do you know why the mesa-nonfree is needed? Is that a matter of licenses and software patents?

Regarding vdpau, I think I’d try without it as vaapi is now working.

Thank you so much for your fast reply and your support for a task that consumed a lot of time. :raised_hands:

5

explained in post 1

…should also work

Hint:
Wayland can cause problems, try with Xorg.

6

Thanks again for your excellent answer. In Ubuntu times, I carefully read the release notes when they launched a new version, I must confess that I missed that due to the rolling releases but maybe this is a good learning: I will now try to regularly read the release notes.
Wayland is doing a good job so far, so I will ditch vdpau for Wayland (and I’m still having a working vaapi now)

7

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