Accelerated Video Playback

Accelerated video playback in NixOS is generally done by adding relevant packages to hardware.graphics.extraPackages.

Installation

Intel

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  hardware.graphics = {
    enable = true;
    extraPackages = with pkgs; [
      intel-media-driver # For Broadwell (2014) or newer processors. LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD
      intel-vaapi-driver # For older processors. LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965
    ];
  };
  environment.sessionVariables = { LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME = "iHD"; }; # Optionally, set the environment variable
}

Copy

Note, intel-vaapi-driver still performs better for browsers (gecko/chromium based) on newer Skylake (2015) processors.

For 32-bit support, use hardware.graphics.extraPackages32:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  hardware.graphics.extraPackages32 = with pkgs.pkgsi686Linux; [ intel-vaapi-driver ];
}

Copy

AMD

AMD configuration (at least for Ryzen 5 iGPUs) works out of the box:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  hardware.graphics.enable = true;
}

Copy

NVIDIA

NVIDIA do not officially support accelerated video playback on Linux. A third-party implementation exists, but does not support Chrome, and has significant limitations compared to the other implementations.

NVIDIA users with a separate iGPU should generally prefer to use their iGPU for this, and therefore look to the above Intel and AMD sections instead.

Users with only an NVIDIA GPU can attempt to use the third party implementation; the package is added to hardware.graphics.extraPackages by default, but it requires some additional setup to be useful:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{ config, lib, ...}: {
  environment.variables.LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME = "nvidia"

  # If used with Firefox
  environment.variables.MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX = "1";

  programs.firefox.preferences = let
    ffVersion = config.programs.firefox.package.version;
  in {
    "media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled" = lib.versionOlder ffVersion "137.0.0";
    "media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled" = lib.versionAtLeast ffVersion "137.0.0";
    "media.rdd-ffmpeg.enabled" = lib.versionOlder ffVersion "97.0.0";

    "gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled" = true;
    "widget.dmabuf.force-enabled" = true;

    # Set this to true if your GPU supports AV1.
    #
    # This can be determined by reading the output of the
    # `vainfo` command, after the driver is enabled with
    # the environment variable.
    "media.av1.enabled" = false;
  };
}

Copy

Testing your configuration

You can test your configuration by running: nix-shell -p libva-utils --run vainfo See Arch Linux wiki#Hardware video acceleration for more information.

Applications

Chromium

See Chromium#Accelerated_video_playback.

Firefox

See Arch Linux wiki#Firefox.

MPV

You can place the following configuration in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf:

hwdec=auto-safe
vo=gpu
profile=gpu-hq
gpu-context=wayland ; On wayland only

See Arch Linux wiki#mpv.

Also see

• Arch Linux wiki#Hardware video acceleration.
• nixos-hardware has example configurations for various types of hardware.