How to install and set up VDPAU hardware acceleration for Intel?

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If you have an nVidia card, the instructions here explain how to install the official nVidia binary driver, including the VDPAU libraries. Other hardware and drivers have varying levels of support for hardware video acceleration, and VDPAU in particular.

How to enable it in your video player depends on what program you use. I suspect that it’ll work out-of-the-box with most current players (e.g. VLC-, MPlayer-, Xine- or GStreamer-based programs).

I got this to work on my system (Lenovo Thinkpad X230, Fedora 20) like this, following a mix of the instruction you linked to and German CT computer magazine.

I installed (you need rpmfusion repositories for this): libvdpau-va-gl vdpauinfo

Then I created the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg with the following content:

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=1

When that was done I could call vdpauinfo like this:

VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl vdpauinfo

and it gave a lot of output, also

VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl firefox

made firefox' flash plugin use hardware acceleration. (Check any youtube video before/after, the CPU load should be much lower now.) Now how to make that permanent? Lacking any better idea, I created a file in /etc/profile.d with this content:

# Local script to set VDPAU_DRIVER to va_gl for Intel
export VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl

which seems to have done the trick; hardware acceleration is now permanently enabled.