Package: release-notes Severity: normal Tags: upstream X-Debbugs-Cc: tom...@gmail.com
Dear Maintainer, With the transition to FFmpeg 5.0, the current stable version line of VLC (3.0.x) dropped VA-API hardware decoding support due to important changes on the FFmpeg API, which will mainly impact Intel GPU users: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/26772 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/merge_requests/1245 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021601 Just like every media player using FFmpeg, VLC had to deal with this change, and they indeed fixed VA-API support... but only on the upcoming 4.0 version, whose release date is still not set (not even a public beta period has been announced yet). Since they're focusing their development efforts on VLC 4, they do not intend to fix VA-API support for VLC 3, which means anyone using VLC will have to fall back to software decoding (with predictable impact on performance / power usage), try using vdpau-va-gl as a bridge between VDPAU and VA-API (this wrapper is known to have stability issues on some setups), or switch to an alternative media player application like mpv. This breakage has the potential to negatively impact the experience of those using VLC as their preferred video player solution on Debian, especially on Intel IGPs, which are a rather large part of the Linux userbase nowadays. Given that upstream is unwilling to provide an acceptable solution (especially considering the current situation of the next major release of VLC), it's important to at least inform the users to be aware of this problem so they can act accordingly to have a smoother video playback experience on their Debian setups.
