[GH-ISSUE #11] Vulkan ffmpeg acceleration? #3

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opened 2026-03-12 18:51:32 +03:00 by kerem · 2 comments

kerem commented

2026-03-12 18:51:32 +03:00

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Originally created by @th0ma7 on GitHub (Dec 29, 2025).
Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/007revad/Transcode_for_x25/issues/11

TL;DR;

I found out about this project by pure coincidence and I thought you may be able to assist OR redirect me to someone who could. Otherwise I'll go through my normal discord synocommunity channels.

I'm a SynoCommunity ffmpeg maintainer and need help in testing vulkan intel-based GPU acceleration (and if this works out on a DS425+ I may switch my DS918+ to this newer model 🤷 ).

This may be a long-shot and feel-free to say you're not interested, I would totally get that.

Long-version

I'm a maintainer part of the SynoCommunity and worked on getting vulkan acceleration built into our ffmpeg package (on top of already supported QSV, VAAPI and OpenCL). I have an on-going PR https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/pull/6867 where I updated to the latest available versions of intel-compute-runtime and IGC using patched llvm-14 and, most importantly, i was finally able to add meson intel vulkan ANV driver.

I was at the stage of testing things out on my DS918+ until I got nagged with an incompatibility with the default 4.4.x kernel (apollolake CPU arch)... reading things through it seems geminilakenk which is what I believe DS425+ is running uses a 5.10 kernel which would be compatible with mesa vulkan driver (at least in theory).

Long-story-short, I would need someone to test this out. Last github builds are available here: https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/actions/runs/20557448743

Documentation to test already functional VAAPI, QSV and OpenCL is here https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/wiki/FAQ-FFmpeg

In theory, it should be a matter of ensuring your username is in the videodriver group then trying out /var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/bin/vulkaninfo. Last time I had to work build options for OpenCL icd.d location and it may be the case as well for vulkan, if that is not working out enforcing where the icd json file location might do the trick:

VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/etc/vulkan/icd.d/intel_icd.x86_64.json /var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/bin/vulkaninfo

If that works out then output of ffmpeg7 -hide_banner -filters | grep vulkan and running a benchmark similar as those I used for other acceleration types would be awesome.

Originally created by @th0ma7 on GitHub (Dec 29, 2025). Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/007revad/Transcode_for_x25/issues/11 ## TL;DR; I found out about this project by pure coincidence and I thought you may be able to assist OR redirect me to someone who could. Otherwise I'll go through my normal discord synocommunity channels. I'm a SynoCommunity ffmpeg maintainer and need help in testing vulkan intel-based GPU acceleration (and if this works out on a DS425+ I may switch my DS918+ to this newer model 🤷 ). This may be a long-shot and feel-free to say you're not interested, I would totally get that. ## Long-version I'm a maintainer part of the SynoCommunity and worked on getting vulkan acceleration built into our ffmpeg package (on top of already supported QSV, VAAPI and OpenCL). I have an on-going PR https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/pull/6867 where I updated to the latest available versions of intel-compute-runtime and IGC using patched llvm-14 and, most importantly, i was finally able to add meson intel vulkan ANV driver. I was at the stage of testing things out on my DS918+ until I got nagged with an incompatibility with the default 4.4.x kernel (apollolake CPU arch)... reading things through it seems geminilakenk which is what I believe DS425+ is running uses a 5.10 kernel which would be compatible with mesa vulkan driver (at least in theory). Long-story-short, I would need someone to test this out. Last github builds are available here: https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/actions/runs/20557448743 Documentation to test already functional VAAPI, QSV and OpenCL is here https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/wiki/FAQ-FFmpeg In theory, it should be a matter of ensuring your username is in the `videodriver` group then trying out `/var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/bin/vulkaninfo`. Last time I had to work build options for OpenCL icd.d location and it may be the case as well for vulkan, if that is not working out enforcing where the icd json file location might do the trick: ``` VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/etc/vulkan/icd.d/intel_icd.x86_64.json /var/packages/synocli-videodriver/target/bin/vulkaninfo ``` If that works out then output of `ffmpeg7 -hide_banner -filters | grep vulkan` and running a benchmark similar as those I used for other acceleration types would be awesome.

kerem commented

2026-03-12 18:51:38 +03:00

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@olivierplichta commented on GitHub (Jan 1, 2026):

Hello, your post interests me. I own a DS425+ and I'm interested in video transcoding. I have a question: what could Vulkan bring to our Synology NAS devices ?

@olivierplichta commented on GitHub (Jan 1, 2026): Hello, your post interests me. I own a DS425+ and I'm interested in video transcoding. I have a question: what could Vulkan bring to our Synology NAS devices ?

kerem commented

2026-03-12 18:51:43 +03:00

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Owner

@th0ma7 commented on GitHub (Jan 1, 2026):

Hello, your post interests me. I own a DS425+ and I'm interested in video transcoding. I have a question: what could Vulkan bring to our Synology NAS devices ?

@olivierplichta you get an additional method for gpu accelerated h.264/5 (h264_vulkan and hevc_vulkan) decoding thus alleviating cpu utilization. Further as pretty much all new development is now vulkan based for video encoding/decoding/filtering.

QSV, OpenCL and VAAPI accelerations are already working great, this being my first stab at adding vulkan - I need to know first if vulkan actually works out with a synology intel-based gpu with 5.10 kernel, if it does then it will be worthwhile to further enhance it, e.g. or technical reasons it currently uses llvm-14 which limits vulkan mesa driver to pre-2024, thus limits video encoding/decoding capabilities. Although if it does work, it could be worthwhile to update that to provide the latest & greatest llvm+mesa, to be seen.

Noting, for it to works it mean you already enabled the video driver enablement from this project.

On my DS918+ it's not working out due to the too old kernel (4.4.x), thus I get:

th0ma7@th0ma7-nas:~$ ffmpeg7 -hide_banner -v verbose -init_hw_device vulkan
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Supported layers:
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using instance extension VK_KHR_portability_enumeration
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] GPU listing:
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0]     0: Intel(R) HD Graphics 500 (APL 2) (integrated) (0x5a85)
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Device 0 selected: Intel(R) HD Graphics 500 (APL 2) (integrated) (0x5a85)
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_push_descriptor
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_physical_device_drm
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_external_memory_fd
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_external_semaphore_fd
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_external_memory_host
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Queue families:
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0]     0: graphics compute transfer (queues: 1)
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Device creation failure: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED
Device creation failed: -542398533.
Failed to set value 'vulkan' for option 'init_hw_device': Generic error in an external library
Error parsing global options: Generic error in an external library

If you're interested we can pursue chat directly on my on-going PR on SynoCommunity: https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/pull/6867

@th0ma7 commented on GitHub (Jan 1, 2026): > Hello, your post interests me. I own a DS425+ and I'm interested in video transcoding. I have a question: what could Vulkan bring to our Synology NAS devices ? @olivierplichta you get an additional method for gpu accelerated h.264/5 (`h264_vulkan` and `hevc_vulkan`) decoding thus alleviating cpu utilization. Further as pretty much all new development is now vulkan based for video encoding/decoding/filtering. QSV, OpenCL and VAAPI accelerations are already working great, this being my first stab at adding vulkan - I need to know first if vulkan actually works out with a synology intel-based gpu with 5.10 kernel, if it does then it will be worthwhile to further enhance it, e.g. or technical reasons it currently uses llvm-14 which limits vulkan mesa driver to pre-2024, thus limits video encoding/decoding capabilities. Although if it does work, it could be worthwhile to update that to provide the latest & greatest llvm+mesa, to be seen. Noting, for it to works it mean you already enabled the video driver enablement from this project. On my DS918+ it's not working out due to the too old kernel (4.4.x), thus I get: ``` th0ma7@th0ma7-nas:~$ ffmpeg7 -hide_banner -v verbose -init_hw_device vulkan [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Supported layers: [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using instance extension VK_KHR_portability_enumeration [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] GPU listing: [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] 0: Intel(R) HD Graphics 500 (APL 2) (integrated) (0x5a85) [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Device 0 selected: Intel(R) HD Graphics 500 (APL 2) (integrated) (0x5a85) [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_push_descriptor [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_physical_device_drm [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_external_memory_fd [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_KHR_external_semaphore_fd [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Using device extension VK_EXT_external_memory_host [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Queue families: [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] 0: graphics compute transfer (queues: 1) [AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x55dad6c01bc0] Device creation failure: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED Device creation failed: -542398533. Failed to set value 'vulkan' for option 'init_hw_device': Generic error in an external library Error parsing global options: Generic error in an external library ``` If you're interested we can pursue chat directly on my on-going PR on SynoCommunity: https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/pull/6867