[Important] Hardware Acceleration in the Open-Source Edition Will Be Discontinued

[getroot]

Starting with the next release, the open-source edition of OvenMediaEngine will no longer support hardware-accelerated features, including hardware encoder integrations such as NVIDIA. Software-based features, including software encoding, remain fully supported in the open-source edition, and no other features are affected.
Supporting hardware-accelerated features is fundamentally different from maintaining software code. Each one requires us to own the actual hardware, keep pace with changes across the driver and SDK stack, and validate it with every release.
Over the past few years, we have supported NVIDIA and Xilinx, and we are now working to add official support for NETINT. Doing so has meant purchasing the hardware ourselves, working directly with each vendor, and committing significant resources. Through this, it became clear that maintaining these features reliably over the long term effectively requires a dedicated team. A commercial product with dedicated staff can keep this up, but an open-source project cannot realistically sustain the same level of effort.
This also follows a principle we have applied to OvenMediaEngine from the beginning: integrations with commercial, third-party hardware and services belong in the Enterprise edition, while the open-source edition stays focused on being a complete, self-contained streaming server that anyone can run on their own.
What this means in practice:

The current release and earlier versions continue to work exactly as they do today, including these accelerated features. However, those paths will no longer be updated in future releases, so they will not receive further improvements or fixes.
Starting with the next release, hardware acceleration is no longer available in the open-source build.
Software encoding and other software-based features remain unchanged.

For environments that require hardware acceleration, these capabilities remain available through OvenMediaEngine Enterprise.
We understand this affects some of you, particularly those running larger deployments, and it was not a decision we made lightly. If you have questions about what this means for your setup, please let us know in the comments and we will follow up.

[bchah]

Anybody who relied on HW Accels for business purposes will find a lot of value in OME Enterprise. And now, official support too. This is a good thing 😀