Microsoft lands DirectX 12 AV1 encode path in Mesa 26.2
Microsoft has upstreamed an early AV1 video encoding path to Mesa 26.2.
According to Phoronix, the code was contributed directly by Microsoft engineers and uses DirectX 12 together with Hardware Media Foundation Transform. HMFT is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer and provides access to hardware media acceleration on Windows.
The new implementation targets Mesa on Windows and is linked to Microsoft’s continued work on Windows Subsystem for Linux . The goal is to provide GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding through a cross-vendor path rather than vendor-specific Linux media APIs.
Early AV1 encode support through DirectX 12
The current implementation is described as a prototype. Phoronix reports that it is already capable of I and P frame encoding, but advanced features are not supported yet. In other words, it’s just initial work that may result in full implemetnation later.
Source: Freedesktop
This update gives Mesa a working base for AV1 encode using DX12 and HMFT. Around 900 lines of code were added on the Mesa side. The change has already landed for Mesa 26.2, which is scheduled as this quarter’s release.
Microsoft has been contributing more graphics and compute work to Mesa as part of its WSL efforts. This new AV1 encode path follows the same direction, with Windows GPU interfaces exposed through Mesa for Linux workloads running under WSL.
Source: Phoronix
