Qt Multimedia on Linux

Platform notes for Linux

This page discusses considerations for using Qt Multimedia on Linux.

Audio backend requirements

Qt Multimedia audio features on Linux require PipeWire or PulseAudio. PipeWire is the recommended backend on all modern Linux distributions, but PulseAudio will be used if PipeWire is not available. The experimental ALSA backend will be deprecated in future versions of Qt. Until then, community contributions are required to fix issues with this backend.

For applications that use the GStreamer backend on embedded Linux, see Qt Multimedia GStreamer backend for additional PulseAudio requirements.

Limitations on Linux using the Wayland compositor

The screen capture feature requires the installation of:

Due to restrictions of the Wayland protocol, the current screen can only be selected through the wizard displayed by the operation system when QScreenCapture instance is activated. For additional details, refer to the QScreenCapture class documentation.

Hardware encoding/decoding drivers

Hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding on Linux requires platform-specific drivers. While Qt Multimedia may fall back to software encoding/decoding if the necessary drivers are not available, installing hardware support drivers can significantly improve performance and reduce CPU usage.

Install the appropriate driver package for your hardware:

  • intel-media-va-driver — Intel Gen 8+ (Broadwell 2014+), Arc A-series, and newer processors

  • intel-media-va-driver-non-free — Intel media driver with additional proprietary codecs

  • i965-va-driver — Older Intel hardware (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell)

  • mesa-va-drivers — VA-API support for AMD GPUs

  • nvidia-driver — NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver (e.g., nvidia-driver-525 or later)