UxPlay uses GStreamer Plugins for rendering audio and video, This means that video and audio are supported “out of the box”, using a choice of plugins. AirPlay streams video in h264 format: gstreamer decoding is plugin agnostic, and uses accelerated GPU hardware h264 decoders if available; if not, software decoding is used.
For systems with Intel or AMD integrated graphics, hardware GPU decoding with the gstreamer VAAPI plugin is preferable. VAAPI is open-source, and in addition to Intel and AMD graphics, the open-source “Nouveau” drivers for NVIDIA graphics are also in principle supported: see here, which requires VAAPI to be supplemented with firmware extracted from the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
-For NVIDIA graphics with the proprietary drivers, the nvh264dec plugin (included in gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad since GStreamer-1.18.0) can be used for accelerated video decoding on the NVIDIA GPU after NVIDIA’s CUDA driver libcuda.so is installed. This plugin should be used with options uxplay -vd nvh264dec -vs glimagesink. For GStreamer-1.16.3 or earlier, the plugin is called nvdec, and must be built by the user: see these instructions. This older form of the NVIDIA plugin should be used with the -vd nvdec -vs glimagesink uxplay options.
For NVIDIA graphics with the proprietary drivers, the nvh264dec plugin (included in gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad since GStreamer-1.18.0) can be used for accelerated video decoding on the NVIDIA GPU after NVIDIA’s CUDA driver libcuda.so is installed. This plugin should be used with options uxplay -vd nvh264dec -vs glimagesink. For GStreamer-1.16.3 or earlier, the plugin is called nvdec, and must be built by the user: see these instructions, and replace nvh264dec by nvdec when using.
GPU Support for Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers can run UxPlay with software decoding of h264 video (by adding -avdec to the uxplay options) but this usually has unacceptable latency, and hardware-accelerated decoding by the Pi’s built-in Broadcom GPU should be used. RPi OS (Bullseye) has stopped supporting the unmaintained 32-bit-only omx (OpenMAX) driver used for this by RPiPlay, in favor of v4l2 (Video4Linux2). Fixes to the GStreamer v4l2 plugin that allow it to work with UxPlay on RPi are now in the GStreamer development branch, and will be available in the upcoming GStreamer-1.22 release, A (partial) backport (as gstreamer1.0-plugins-good-1.18.4-2+~rpt1) has already appeared in RPi OS updates. Until the full update appears, or if you are using a different distribution, you can find patching instructions for GStreamer in the UxPlay Wiki. Patches are available for all GStreamer releases 1.18.4 and later.