Microsoft Lands Initial AV1 Encoding Using DirectX 12 + HMFT Within Mesa 26.2

Source Domain: www.phoronix.com

The newest, unexpected addition to the Mesa codebase by Microsoft engineers is contributed accelerated AV1 video encoding on the GPU using a combination of DirectX 12 and the Hardware Media Foundation Transform (HMFT) support that is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer.

This AV1 video encoding layered upon DX12+HMFT for cross-vendor support on Windows is done to benefit Microsoft’s continued ambitions around Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) support.

The code merged today for Mesa 26.2 provides a “prototype” implementation good enough for I and P frame encoding but not any advanced features until further integration takes place. This new Mesa code was worked on directly by Microsoft engineers.

Getting this AV1 encode prototype up and running was just around 900 new lines of code on the Mesa side. Those interested can see this merge request for the code now upstreamed for this quarter’s Mesa 26.2 release.

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