Firefox Is Seeing Work On Wayland VA-API Video Acceleration

[boxie]

What should I think? Firefox isn't a free web browser (anymore or since the flash plugin was killed)?
Every good video player use the GPU video acceleration (what!, those using the gst shit doesn't?) with very very low impact on resources since ever. And now, someone would pass this as a great new thing?
Well, it's time for a completely new, independent web browser using a completely different engine.
Opera (browser), why, why, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!

so, Mozilla have been developing servo for a long time now in fact

Development of Servo began in 2012

is what Wikipedia says.

it seems to be rather difficult and time consuming to develop web browsers - the fact that Opera stopped developing Presto and switched to blink, and microsoft have done the same thing shows us that it very difficult and expensive, much easier to just do the chrome around the outside.

[Hibbelharry]

It probably won't work right if they don't actually test it on AMD hardware during development. Sorry. This whole wayland thing is looking like a dystopian fanboy dream...

The first thing is right, the second is utter nonsense. VA-API does standardize a lot of things concerning video playback and offers (mostly) the same interfaces in X11 and wayland. Still, not all players work with every gpu, because there are some nitpicks outside of the not perfect VA-API standards, so that applies to both X11 and wayland. Wayland just offers some superior other handles in the processing chain, that X11 never offered, so it seems pretty sensible to try to make it work in wayland. When that's done they might try to do the X11 overhead, but I doubt it, it's a dead end.

[Guest]

Sorry to ruin your daydream. Opera switched to Blink in 2013.
Since you don't like Firefox, well, welcome to a world of browsers controlled by Google.

Question:
Firefox is controlled by who?

[cl333r]

Question:
Firefox is controlled by who?

By whom? - Mozilla, but also Google because it pays Mozilla.

[Hibbelharry]

By whom? - Mozilla, but also Google because it pays Mozilla.

Thats not the whole answer. Sure Mozilla gets most of it's money currently from google, but they're trying to generate other income, by for example starting to offer kind of VPN services. And Google and Mozilla aren't controlled by the same people, so they might cut their relation when they're in need. So Google might partially control Mozilla currently, but not to absolute degree.

[brent]

Wayland lets you avoid copying pixels around and works on the concept of shared buffers. Firefox can set the hardware decoder to use a shared buffer that's also shared with the compositor.

This isn't really possible under X, Firefox would have to start copying pixels everywhere which is terrible for performance and battery life reasons.

I've heard this multiple times. I don't know who started this, but it's simply wrong. There are zero-copy interfaces that allow buffer sharing into OpenGL and Vulkan. If you're interested, check how mpv or VLC are doing it.

The real reason is probably much simpler: this is done by Red Hat, and they want to promote Wayland.

[Britoid]

I've heard this multiple times. I don't know who started this, but it's simply wrong. There are zero-copy interfaces that allow buffer sharing into OpenGL and Vulkan. If you're interested, check how mpv or VLC are doing it.

The real reason is probably much simpler: this is done by Red Hat, and they want to promote Wayland.

You're going to get copying done by the compositor and I'm talking about shared buffers between the compositor, the clients and the video decoder.

Besides, VLC and mpv don't have to embed a video inside of other content, so they're not really comparable. Although VLC and mpvcan both benefit from Wayland.

Intel gives more of a damn about Wayland than Red Hat does, Red Hat really doesn't care about the Linux desktop.

[CommunityMember]

Any technical reason because it is wayland only and not x11?

From dealing with VA-API in another use case, there were some subtle differences that cropped up with Wayland and X11. So it is likely that the itch that the Martin, or one of his customers, had was for support of VA-API with Wayland, and that was what was initially delivered. It is entirely possible that the code can be extended at some point for X11, but anyone who has that particular itch should step up and contribute that code. Open source projects are about an itch (sometimes that itch is the client paying for the work), and contributing.

[xpris]

BTW, what with VAAPI implement in Servo (experimental engine) for X? Is still coming or this feature from topic, replace it?

[polarathene]

Opera (browser), why, why, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!

You know that browser got sold to a chinese search engine or something right? So they're not going to be much different than Google, especially with using Blink as the engine under the hood.