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AMD VAAPI

VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) provides hardware-accelerated video encoding on AMD GPUs under Linux. If you have a Radeon GPU and you're on Linux, this is your backend.

What you get​

  • VAAPI encoding: h264_vaapi, hevc_vaapi. Hardware-accelerated encoding.
  • VAAPI scaling: scale_vaapi resizes frames on the GPU.
  • Face detection: falls back to CPU (OpenCV Haar cascades). AMD doesn't expose a GPU-accelerated face detection path.

Requirements​

  • AMD GPU with VAAPI support
  • Linux (VAAPI is Linux-only)
  • Mesa VA drivers installed (mesa-va-drivers on Debian/Ubuntu, libva-mesa-driver on Arch)
  • FFmpeg built with VAAPI support

Check availability:

immich-memories hardware

You can also verify VAAPI is working at the system level:

vainfo

This should list the available VA profiles and entrypoints for your GPU.

Configuration​

hardware:
  enabled: true
  encoder_preset: "balanced"   # fast | balanced | quality

VAAPI is the last backend probed, so it is used when nothing else (NVIDIA, Apple, QSV) is available. There is no explicit selector.

In Docker​

services:
  immich-memories:
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
    group_add:
      - "video"
      - "render"     # numeric GID from `getent group render` if the name does not resolve

Limitations​

  • Linux only: VAAPI isn't available on macOS or Windows
  • No GPU face detection: face-aware cropping uses CPU OpenCV, which is slower but still functional
  • Encoding quality varies by GPU generation. Newer RDNA chips produce better output than older GCN cards at the same bitrate.