Consider blocklisting the Intel i965 VAAPI driver
The Gnome project currently considers enabling hardware encoding for screencasting by default in the upcoming 42 release. Right now it looks like only three driver implementations are allowed by default:
Intel i965 driver
Intel iHD driver
Mesa Gallium driver
During testing it was found that the i965 driver was by far the one most likely to cause issues. Further more, unlike the later ones which appear to have active upstream activity and generally responsive developers, development on the i965 driver appears to have mostly stalled.
In order to provide a more reliable out-of-the-box experience, would it make sense to consider disabling that driver by default? It looks like at least Gnome-Shell otherwise would need to carry its own blocklist.
While this decreases VAAPI support on the first look, the hope by the responsive Shell devs is that using hardware encoding by default in more common places increases driver quality eventually, leading to more widespread use.