Microsoft engineers recently contributed accelerated AV1 video encoding capabilities to the Mesa 26.2 codebase. This new functionality enables GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding by leveraging a combination of DirectX 12 and the Hardware Media Foundation Transform (HMFT). Phoronix noted this as "the newest, unexpected addition" to Mesa, integrating HMFT support which is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer. This development introduces a new path for hardware-accelerated video encoding on Linux, utilizing Microsoft's own technologies within the open-source Mesa graphics stack.