Accelerated Video Playback

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

Installation

Intel

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  hardware.graphics = { # hardware.opengl in 24.05 and older 
    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
}

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.opengl.extraPackages32 in 24.05
  hardware.graphics.extraPackages32 = with pkgs.pkgsi686Linux; [ intel-vaapi-driver ];
}

AMD

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

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  hardware.opengl.enable = true;
}

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.