OBS has only "Software" encoder despite VAAPI being installed

Hello everyone,

When using OBS (from Flathub) on my Fedora Silverblue setup, the game sound lags and cracks a lot, making it very unpleasant to hear. This happens during video recording but mostly while streaming. Since I didn’t had this issue when I was using Arch Linux on this same computer (with an AMD R9 380 GPU), I suspect a CPU overuse.

So in order to enable hardware acceleration, I’ve followed the instructions provided by the RPM Fusion website. I was only able to launch the first command line; the second one failed with “error: Package "mesa-vdpau-drivers" not found”.

Anyway, after rebooting, the Settings window in OBS still only allows me to pick up “Software (x264)” as Encoder, although I can see the following in the OBS logs:

12:29:56.356: VAAPI: API version 1.15
12:29:56.775: FFmpeg VAAPI H264 encoding supported

I’ve checked the list of all my installed apps and runtimes using flatpak list --all as advised in this topic, but all of my packages are either from flathub or fedora remotes.

A layered install of OBS (from the RPM Fusion build) has the same behavior. The logs differ slightly with this message:

13:01:35.370: FFMPEG VAAPI supported

Is there a way to enable hardware accelerated encoding in OBS on Silverblue?

The output of:

flatpak list --all | grep org.freedesktop.Platform

would help. Updating Flatpaks should also install the missing dependencies automatically:

flatpak update

You generally don’t need to add things to your host to make Flatpaks work as that’s the main goal of Flatpaks: being independent of what’s installed on your system.

Here the output of flatpak list --all | grep org.freedesktop.Platform after performing a flatpak update (the behavior in OBS hasn’t changed):

Freedesktop Platform	org.freedesktop.Platform	21.08.18	21.08	flathub	system
Freedesktop Platform	org.freedesktop.Platform	22.08.9	22.08	flathubsystem
i386	org.freedesktop.Platform.Compat.i386		22.08	flathub	system
Mesa	org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default	21.3.9	21.08	flathub	system
Mesa	org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default	22.3.5	22.08	flathub	system
Mesa (Extra)	org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default	22.3.5	22.08-extra	flathub	system
Mesa	org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default	22.3.5	22.08	flathub	system
Mesa (Extra)	org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default	22.3.5	22.08-extra	flathub	system
freedesktop platform translations	org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale		21.08	flathub	system
freedesktop platform translations	org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale		22.08	flathub	system
ffmpeg-full	org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full		21.08	flathubsystem
ffmpeg-full	org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full		22.08	flathubsystem
openh264	org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264	2.1.0	2.0	flathubsystem
openh264	org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264	2.1.0	2.2.0	flathubsystem

Hope this helps!

On a perhaps related note, I’ve upgraded to Silverblue 38 and re-installed the RPM Fusion packages, and I’ve noticed that Totem does not use hardware acceleration anymore (100% CPU + very laggy video playback), whereas VLC does not have these issues. What should I check on my setup?