EndeavourOS Mesa Codec Support

General system Newbie
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I am currently a Manjaro user and have been happy with the distro up until today’s release when they announced they were going the same route as Fedora and removing hardware acceleration for proprietary video codecs (most commonly H.264 and H.265) when using the Mesa drivers stack.

Having an AMD GPU, this directly impacts me in a negative way and I’m in the market for a new distro that does not disable these codecs. I have enjoyed using Endeavour OS in a VM and my question is, does Endeavour OS support hardware acceleration for H.264 and H.265 when using the Mesa driver stack?

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They are still enabled in the Arch package which is what we use.

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3

Thank you very much for the fast response.

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Welcome to the forum!

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5

Welcome to the purple space!!

:rocketa_purple: :enos_flag:

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Stupid question but why does mesa need to ship with codecs, and not ffmpeg? Are codecs driver-specific?

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Mesa is used for the decoding/encoding by the GPU (hardware like VAAPI and VDPAU).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration

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This change specifically impacts AMD GPUs as they use the Mesa packages for their hardware acceleration of those specific codecs. NVIDIA and Intel GPUs each provide their own implementations of those codecs and are not impacted by this change.

You can manually download the Mesa drivers from the Arch repository or compile Mesa with the codecs enabled but I’d prefer not to deal with that hassle every month or so when I can just choose another Linux distro who chooses not to disable the codecs and update normally.

Note, I don’t blame the Manjaro maintainers for making this choice. It just reduces their risk which I can understand. The Arch maintainers appear to have made a different choice and, as I’ve learned, flows to EndeavourOS which is motivation to switch for me personally.

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It also impacts people with old Nvidia GPUs using Mesa+Nouveau.

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