In this guide we will see how to enable the VDPAU hardware acceleration in flash player on Ubuntu and derivatives for any Nvidia, Intel and AMD GPU.
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is the name of a library that allows to assign a part of the workload of decoding and post-processing a video to the GPU; this features can be used even for Flash playback.
In Ubuntu the native support for the VDPAU hardware acceleration is not active by default, but it can ben enabled with the following procedure:
To enable the VDPAU Hardware Acceleration for a nVidia GPU
sudo apt-get install libvdpau1 vdpau-va-driver
sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
sudo echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1\nOverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
To enable the VDPAU Hardware Acceleration for an AMD GPU (with proprietary drivers)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xvba-va-driver libvdpau-va-gl1sudo sh -c "echo 'export VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl' >> /etc/profile"
sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
sudo echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1\nOverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
To enable the VDPAU Hardware Acceleration for an AMD GPU (with open source drivers)
sudo apt-get install mesa-vdpau-drivers
sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
sudo echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1\nOverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
To enable the VDPAU Hardware Acceleration for an Intel GPU
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install i965-va-driver libvdpau-va-gl1
sudo sh -c "echo 'export VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl' >> /etc/profile"
sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
sudo echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1\nOverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
Once the drivers are installed you need to reboot the computer.