Hardware decoding on Linux

Intel and AMD

With recent mesa and ffmpeg, both cards are supported by VA-API through libva>=2.1. Install libva-intel-driver and libva-mesa-driver. Make sure that your system does not have the following packages,

1. libva-vdpau
2. libva-va-gl
3. libvdpau-va-gl

Intel

You need to use hwdec=vaapi and other options can be configured according to your GPU. To make it permanent, add it to ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf.

AMD with PRIME

Since dedicated graphics are going to be used, some environment variables are specified to instruct the driver to load specific modules.

DRI_PRIME=1
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=r600 # value depends on the driver, check /usr/lib/dri for possible options

In mpv, you specify hwdec=vaapi and gpu-context=x11egl for Xorg.