Thanks for sharing Mark. I do have other ffmpeg pipelines that work very nicely - but are a mix of S/W and GPU for various stages. I neglected to mention these for the sake of brevity. I'm looking for a solution that completely constrains the pipeline to GPU only. > $ ffmpeg -hwaccel vaapi -hwaccel_output_format vaapi -hwaccel_device /dev/dri/renderD128 -i in.mp4 -an -vf 'fps=30,scale_vaapi=1280:720' -c:v h264_vaapi -b:v 2M out.mp4 Does fps=30 in your example demonstrate that something in the GPU between the decoder and the scaler is in fact dropping decoded frames? Or are those surfaces actually being returned to ffmpegs internal graph only to be dropped (or forwarded back to the scaler)?

If surface handles are being returned to ffmpegs graph, to be dropped or forwarded then this is perfect.