Microsoft adds prototype AV1 encoding to Mesa 26.2 for WSL

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Microsoft lands DirectX 12 AV1 encode path in Mesa 26.2

Microsoft has upstreamed an early AV1 video encoding path to Mesa 26.2.



According to Phoronix, the code was contributed directly by Microsoft engineers and uses DirectX 12 together with Hardware Media Foundation Transform. HMFT is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer and provides access to hardware media acceleration on Windows.

The new implementation targets Mesa on Windows and is linked to Microsoft’s continued work on Windows Subsystem for Linux. The goal is to provide GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding through a cross-vendor path rather than vendor-specific Linux media APIs.

Early AV1 encode support through DirectX 12

The current implementation is described as a prototype. Phoronix reports that it is already capable of I and P frame encoding, but advanced features are not supported yet. In other words, it’s just initial work that may result in full implemetnation later. 

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