Enabling hardware acceleration in VLC on ATI

Hello all

As you may know XvBA is not really work and yet buggy, so we can’t use XvBA for decoding H.264 in most cases. I figure it out that we can use the DRI driver for hardware acceleration.

First you must add these lines to /etc/environment

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=fglrx_dri
LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib64/dri

Then you must force the driver to load dri driver (/etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Section "Module"
    Load  "dri"
EndSection

and add this to the "Section “Device”

Option        "DRI" "on"

Now restart your X to apply changes then check if DRI driver loaded correctly

set | grep LIBVA

the result must be

LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib64/dri
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=fglrx_dri

To active hardware acceleration open VLC and go to
Tools–>Preferences–>Input & Codecs–>Use GPU accelerated decoding

Note: this method require the ATI proprietary driver (fglrx)

Have a lot of fun!

EDIT

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=fglrx_dri
LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib64/dri

“lib64” is for x86_64 architecture and “lib” is for x86 architecture