[Spice-devel] RFC: Integrating Virgil and Spice

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> I think nearly all GPUs, Intel ones included can do on-board H264 encoding now,
> the vaapi for Intel exports this ability, not sure how to expose it on
> non-intel GPUs,
> or how they expose it under Windows etc.
> 
> The problem for us is the usual patent minefield around h264.

Yep.  Offloading the work to the hardware may get around that.  IANAL
though.  But not having a software fallback for patent reasons isn't
very nice.  Especially on the decoding end.  Encoding without hardware
support probably isn't very useful anyway.

cheers,
  Gerd