Building Mesa from Source (with VA-API) on Fedora.

Fedora and openSUSE are removing H.264, H.265, and VC-1 VA-API video codecs support from Mesa to avoid potential patent issues.

Why does it matter? #

H26X's are currently the world’s most used HD video compression standards. Without Mesa supporting these codecs, any video playback will fallback to be CPU decoded, instead of GPU (which is inefficent, and may straight up not work on dated computers, and apps that heavily rely on video encoding / decoding.)

Workaround / Fix #

If you're on Fedora 37 Beta and have an AMD GPU, one of the easiest ways to get x264 hardware accelerated encoding back would be to build Mesa drivers from source. (Until we eventually get an RPM Fusion package.)

Mesa have an option -Dvideo-codecs=h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc,vc1dec to do just that. (Credits to iceixia for his script)

Steps #

cd $HOME
sudo dnf install rpmdevtools
rpmdev-setuptree 	#Create RPM build tree within user's home directory

Download Mesa Source and build dependencies

dnf download --source mesa #Download the source rpm.
sudo dnf builddep mesa #Install whatever is needed to build the given .src.rpm, .nosrc.rpm or .spec file.
rpm --install *.src.rpm #Install the source rpm.

Add the missing video codec option to the mesa.spec file.

cd $HOME/rpmbuild/SPECS
sed -i '/^%meson #/a \ \ -Dvideo-codecs=h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc,vc1dec #' mesa.spec

Build the RPM package from spec. This should take a few minutes.

rpmbuild -bb mesa.spec

Install the newly compiled rpms.

cd $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64
sudo dnf install *.rpm

Run vainfo to check whether the driver supports H264.

sudo dnf install libva-utils
vainfo

It should show something like this

While this may not be ideal, this should serve as a workaround until better solutions are in place.

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