VAAPI decode stays; what changes is who touches the YUV. The direct path hands
the NV12 dmabuf (tiled AMD modifier since Mesa 25.1) to GdkDmabufTexture, and
GTK's tiled-NV12 import renders corrupt/gray/washed-out on the Deck. Moonlight
and mpv are clean on the same box because they import the dmabuf into their own
EGL context and convert with their own shader — video_gl.rs is that
architecture for the GTK client: per-plane EGLImages (R8 + GR88, modifier
passed through) → our YUV→RGB shader (matrix/range from the stream's CICP
signaling, unit-tested) → RGBA texture in a GdkGLContext-shared context →
fence-synced GdkGLTexture. GTK composites plain RGBA; no YUV negotiation, no
compositor CSC.
The Deck's decoder default flips back to hardware (the software stopgap is
gone); desktops keep the direct dmabuf path (offload/scan-out eligible).
PUNKTFUNK_PRESENT=direct|gl overrides either way. New failure ladder: GL
converter init failure or a convert-error streak raises a shared flag and the
session pump demotes the decoder to software with a keyframe re-request — the
same mechanism also closes the old silent-black-screen gap where a rejected
dmabuf import had no recovery at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
b488bd1d99