Video Acceleration on OpenBSD

Posted:: 2025-04-15

A few days ago, I came across a news article about OpenBSD enabling VA-API for video acceleration. I found it pretty interesting - the change was made last year during the OpenBSD Hackathon c2k24. Since I have set up vedio acceleration on Gentoo before, I am thinking of giving it a shot on OpenBSD as well.

My laptop uses Intel integrated graphics - specifically the Intel HD Graphics 620, which belongs to the Kaby Lake family:

# pcidump
        ...
        0:2:0: Intel HD Graphics 620
        ...

When it comes to VA-API support on Intel graphics, there are two main driver packages available - intel-vaapi-driver and intel-media-driver . The detailed comparison between the two can be found in Arch Wiki - Hardware video acceleration. In short, intel-media-driver supports newer generations of intel graphics, while intel-vaapi-driver is intended for older GPUs.

Although most video decoding and encoding features for my GPU are supported by both, I decided to go with intel-media-driver since the development of intel-vaapi-driver has been ceased (i.e., the project has been archived publicly). I also installed libva-utils to help inspect information from VA-API driver:

# pkg_add intel-media-driver libva-utils

After installation, VA-API features need to be enabled for specific applications. For example:

Firefox:

about:config
        gfx.webrender.all             true
        media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled    true

MPV:

$ nano ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
        hwdec=vaapi

For more details, check out vedio acceleration on Gentoo.

Thanks for reading :)