Wine 11.16 Released With VA-API Hardware Decoding, Better ARM64 Support

Wine 11.16 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms.

Most exciting with Wine 11.16 is implementing hardware-accelerated video decoding using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). This VA-API support is a VA-API back-end to Direct3D video decode. The code by Elizabeth Figura of CodeWeavers implements H.264 decoding with WineD3D and plumbs in the necessary integration around VA-API with WineD3D. The code in current form though only supports H.264 decoding and not H.265 or other alternatives.

Wine 11.16 also brings ARM64 improvements including an updated Wine Mono engine now supporting 64-bit ARM. There is also improved exception handling on ARM64EC.

Wine 11.16 brings 35 known bug fixes helping games like Command and Conquer 3 and the Steam client to apps like Siemens Automation and regedit. There is also a Wayland fix in Wine 11.16 around $WAYLAND_DISPLAY handling.

Wine 11.16 downloads and more information on this development release in the road toward Wine 12.0 stable via WineHQ.org.