Hardware encoding support on Ubuntu 25.04

vagaus

vagaus

New Member
Hi. I'm trying to configure OBS to use hardware encoding with no success.
Before I continue, I must make it clear that:
  1. I am not an experienced Linux user :(
  2. My knowledge on graphics cards are also not very good :(
So any help is highly appreciated.

My understanding is that if I had hardware support I'd see VAAPI H.264, VAAPI HEVC, and VAAPI AV1 (or something like that) as encoder options, which I don't see.

Based on the (attached) OBS logs it seems I am missing some configuration as I can see the following message:

12:07:11.839: VAAPI: Failed to initialize display in vaapi_device_h264_supported
Click to expand...

but it seems VAAPI is setup on my machine. `vainfo` output:

Trying display: wayland
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.22.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver for Intel(R) Gen Graphics - 25.4.2 ()
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileNone : VAEntrypointVideoProc
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileJPEGBaseline : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileJPEGBaseline : VAEntrypointEncPicture
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileVP8Version0_3 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile1 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile3 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain12 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain422_10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain422_10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain422_12 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain444_10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444_10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCMain444_12 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCSccMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCSccMain : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCSccMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCSccMain10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCSccMain444 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCSccMain444 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
VAProfileHEVCSccMain444_10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCSccMain444_10 : VAEntrypointEncSlice
Click to expand...

Any idea on how to investigate / fix this ?
 

Attachments

It's incredibly unintuitive and nobody tells you this for some reason.
But you need to enable advanced mode to see the other encoders.

You can either use the ffmpeg plugin or OBS' native integration. I've had better success with ffmpeg in the past.
For some reason, only x264 is shown unless you enable advanced settings. I could swear this wasn't the case on Windows, but haven't used it in forever, so can't be sure.
 
Schaka said:
It's incredibly unintuitive and nobody tells you this for some reason.
But you need to enable advanced mode to see the other encoders.

You can either use the ffmpeg plugin or OBS' native integration. I've had better success with ffmpeg in the past.
For some reason, only x264 is shown unless you enable advanced settings. I could swear this wasn't the case on Windows, but haven't used it in forever, so can't be sure.
Click to expand...
thanks for your reply, but even in advanced mode I don't VAAPI listed (see attached screenshot).

1767415954743.png
 
The log message is the crucial part.

Not sure if that may be a Flatpak issue? Perhaps try with a native system package and check if it is working there. Else it may be that you need additional packages for the encoder on that GPU.
 
I notice you're using Intel Arc GPU. There have been issues with Flatpak in the past re: Intel QSV, e.g. https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/10156 - but I'm not sure that's the problem here.

Your Ryzen processor also has graphics and video decode/encode capabilities. As a workaround, you could try switching to that by setting the appropriate value of LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME when you run OBS, e.g. in the terminal try LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi obs. You can also test it by running LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi vainfo
 
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