VA-API Hardware Encoder Checker

A utility to check VA-API hardware encoding capabilities on headless Linux systems.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.18 or later
• libva-dev and libva-drm-dev packages installed
• DRM render node access rights

Ubuntu 22.04

An example of installing the required tool using Ubuntu 22.04.

Installing

Install Go

sudo apt-get install golang-go

Install the required libraries

sudo apt-get install libva-dev libdrm-dev pkg-config

Check if pkg-config can find libva and libva-drm

pkg-config --libs --cflags libva libva-drm

Make sure your user has access to DRM render nodes:

sudo usermod -a -G render,video $USER

Building

Clear the cache if required.

go clean -cache

Build verbosely.

go build -v -x ./cmd/vaapi-checker

Running

./vaapi-checker

The output will look something like this:

AMD Radeon RX 7900GRE

libva info: VA-API version 1.21.0
libva info: Trying to open /run/opengl-driver/lib/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_21
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
VA-API Hardware Encoding Capabilities:
Implementation: AMD

Supported Encoding Formats:
- H.264 Main
- H.264 High
- HEVC Main
- AV1

AMD Radeon 680M (iGP)

./vaapi-checker
libva info: VA-API version 1.20.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_20
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
VA-API Hardware Encoding Capabilities:
Implementation: AMD

Supported Encoding Formats:
- H.264 Main
- H.264 High
- HEVC Main

Intel UHD Graphics 630

libva info: VA-API version 1.21.0
libva info: Trying to open /run/opengl-driver/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_21
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
VA-API Hardware Encoding Capabilities:
Implementation: Intel

Supported Encoding Formats:
- H.264 Main
- H.264 High
- HEVC Main