freerdp(7)

✨ CODEC BACKENDS ✨

okay bestie, welcome to freerdp(7), the manual page about codec backends 💖

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea: H264 encoding and decoding can be handled by a bunch of different backends. not all of them are gonna show up for you tho — it 100% depends on which operating system you're on and which compilation options got used. so like, don't be surprised if your fave isn't there, it's not you, it's the build 💅

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🎀 BACKEND NAME 🎀

FFMPEG — FFMPEG based H264 encoding/decoding support. that's the one, that's the name, no notes 🦋

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🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

H264 encoding and decoding can be provided by various backends. one of these utilizes the FFMPEG framework. it gives you a high level abstraction that's capable of using hardware backed encoding and decoding — lowkey iconic tbh ✨

to enable this feature, these three requirements must be met:

1. The RDP client or server must enable support for this feature.
2. The environment variables or configuration file must not have it disabled
3. The hardware must actually support the requested accelerator

ngl requirement 3 is the vibe check that fails the most. your hardware has to actually support the accelerator you're asking for, no cap 🙈

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💜 CONFIG FILE 💜

📁 Format and Location:

The configuration file is stored system wide or per user.

The XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable can be used to override the base directory for per user configurations.

The user configuration defaults to ~/.config The location relative to XDG_CONFIG_HOME is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/freerdp/ffmpeg.json

For system wide configurations the default is /etc/freerdp/ffmpeg.json

The configuration is stored in JSON format 🍓

⚙️ Supported options:

• allowUserConfig — (system config only) Allow the user configuration file to be used.
  • Default true
  • A JSON bool value
• allowEnvOverrides — Allow environment variables to be evaluated.
  • Default true
  • A JSON bool value
• seHwDecoderfR — Enable hardware accelerated decoding.
  • Default true
  • A JSON bool value
• useHwEncoder — Enable hardware accelerated encoding.
  • Default true
  • A JSON bool value
• hwDeviceType — Set acceleration API to use.
  • Default platform dependent default accelerator
  • A JSON string value
• hwDeviceName — Set hardware device to utilize.
  • Default Default device used by accelerator
  • A JSON string value

not me side-eyeing seHwDecoderfR — yes bestie, that's literally how it's spelled in the config, keep it exactly like that, don't "fix" it, i'm begging 😭

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

• FREERDP_VAAPI_DEVICE — legacy option, superseded by FREERDP_HWCTX_DEVICE
• FREERDP_HWCTX_DEVICE — For accelerators that support to select from different devices the device to us.
• FREERDP_HWCTX_TYPE — The accelerator type, see enum AVHWDeviceType for possible supported accelerators. Use av_hwdevice_get_type_name to get the actual values that can be put here.

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💀 BUGS 💀

Please report any bugs at https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/issues

if something's cursed, tell the maintainers, not the group chat 🫶

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

Additional information and the latest version is available at: https://freerdp.com

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🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

Armin Novak <anovak@thincast.com>

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okay that's the whole page, you ate it up fr fr 💅

freerdp(7) — Version 3.0, dated September 2026. slay, go configure your ffmpeg backend bestie 💖✨🌸