Accelerated Video Playback

This page is meant to help with techniques for getting accelerated video playback working in NixOS.

This is done by adding relevant libva-related packages to the hardware.opengl.extraPackages option.

Additionally, the vaapiIntel package can be overriden to enable Intel's Hybrid Driver.

Sample configuration:

 {
   ...
   nixpkgs.config.packageOverrides = pkgs: {
     vaapiIntel = pkgs.vaapiIntel.override { enableHybridCodec = true; };
   };
   hardware.opengl = {
     enable = true;
     extraPackages = with pkgs; [
       vaapiIntel
       vaapiVdpau
       libvdpau-va-gl
     ];
   };
   ...
 }

Prepared Hardware configuration

Sometimes different opengl packages are required to achieve full performance. You can check different configuration repositories for similar hardware configuration:

The NixOS-Hardware Repository

Applications

Chromium

Needs a patch for VA-API support, see nixpkgs#21481 for current status.

MPV

@Mic92 needed the following configuration in ~/.mpv/config for mpv to use hardware acceleration for VP9 on Intel Broadwell:

hwdec=vaapi
vo=gpu
hwdec-codecs=all

This is based on the archlinux MPV article.

Other

See the Arch Linux wiki.