Google Still Doesn't Trust Linux GPU Drivers Enough To Enable Chrome Video Acceleration

[lakerssuperman]

After first seeing this article and realizing Chromium in the Tumbleweed repo has the VA-API patch I installed it and gave it a try since this was something I really want to have working. I installed it on my Ivy Bridge laptop and one of my desktops with a Radeon 5570. It seems to run fine on my Ivy Bridge machine, but I experienced corruption on my 5570 machine. So I can see why there is some hesitation. That said, the fact that this functionality is there and on at least some machines it runs well I don't see why giving us a flag to enable it and some recommendations on which hardware will provide a decent experience isn't a good place to start.

What I think really needs to happen is that VA-API needs to become the decode/encode API of Linux at a core level. Polish everything to work with it (drivers, video players etc.) and then these browsers will be in a better position to go that last mile. VDPAU needs to be put out to pasture and if VA-API isn't something that is possible with NVIDIA then so be it. Intel hardware is great for mobile and light desktop usage and if you want more muscle, Radeon GPU's provide more muscle for playing games etc. This is more or less what Apple does. Intel and Radeon stuff is what they go with. NVIDIA is an option, but not the primary one despite the performance difference.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but literally everything desktop software oriented in Linux land, at least in my experience, runs better on Intel and AMD. Gnome, even with the documented performance issues, is much choppier on NVIDIA. I experience corruption in KDE Plasma. MPV and VLC with hardware decode perform awfully on NVIDIA. I recently upgraded my old GTX 660Ti to a Radeon RX 580 on my main machine and couldn't be happier with the overall better desktop performance.

I do hope that Chrome/Chromium and Firefox as well will continue to evaluate this situation and I hope that Linux will converge around VA-API and we will have great hardware encode/decode across the board in the future.

[wizard69]

Interesting thread with much mud slinging. As for what works and how well I blazed a trail with the Ryzen mobile platform last year and frankly anybody that thinks Windows ran fine there is nuts. The experience was so bad I seriously considered returning the laptop.
Lon that machine Linux support was slow in coming, basically 7 months. However basic behavior on Linux quickly solidified and actually was running better than Windows a month later. A couple of months later realizing Windows was going no where I deleted it completely. At this point I have only a couple of transient issues, other wise the machine is snappy.

Now does that that mean GPU support is excellent - nope. However by tracking Phoronix and other sites I have a good understanding of where various improvements will make their way into the kernel or Mesa. In a very literal sense each and every Fedora update has delivered an improvement to how this machine functions. Running Fedora 29 beta I get better HiDPI support, snapper behavior and an all around feeling of a silkier GUI. Would Video acceleration help? Well I don’t use chrome so I’m not sure the question makes sense. Most of my recent video viewing has been via VLC and I honestly don’t know how or if acceleration is used there. Something has changed though in Fedora 29 as VLC seems to glitch less.

[cynical]

I would like to see Linux get to the level of MacOS as far as being trouble free and versatile. Usability wise though Linux is light years ahead of Windows.

It will only be that way with good vendor support. I'm not sure if Dell or some of the others that support Linux (at least Ubuntu) do it well or not, but it will take effort on their part to make it happen. I don't mind though. In my experience the support is pretty good after a month or two, and excellent after 6-8 months.

Thanks for sharing your experience with Ryzen mobile. Is the battery life decent? Btw, you can use Send to MPV/Send to VLC extensions for Firefox or Chrome. I use it all the time on my laptop, just as much for the pleasant viewing experience as the juice saving.

Firefox:
Send to MPV
Send to VLC

Chromium:
Send to VLC
(no MPV addon for Chromium from this author, but there are others)

[Soul_keeper]

This is funny, because I feel the same way about google and all their projects ....
Really they ruin everything.

[NotMine999]

Well then, spend a few of those hundred-billions and rewrite the relevant parts of the graphics driver stack in Rust, with an easily-extensible and test-driven design.

Rust this! Rust that! Rust everything! Geez talk about fixations!

Here's a word to the wise: Rust does not solve every problem. If it did there would be human beings walking on planet Mars and world hunger would be a thing of the past.

[microcode]

Seems to work just fine, and has on a pretty good handful of devices. I get that they don't want to have to validate it, but at the same time it seems like it works on at least some hardware pretty reliably.

[finalzone]

[...]Sadly there is no real alternative to iPhone at the moment. Google and Android just leaves mefeeling violated.

Latest Galaxy S and Note series disagree. Both devices got iPhone beat in term of features and functionality. Hard fact is Android would not reach the current level without the contribution from Samsung via Samsung Experience formely Touchwiz.

[birdie]

All you do in this thread is shitposting. Not a single contribution of value in your entire post history. Instead of listing actual problems which are found in bugtrackers etc. related to the Chrome decision, you spew unrelated irrational nonsense.

Another example of your uninformed shitposting. If you had actually bothered to follow the Adobe Flash VDPAU issue, then you would have known that the color swap was a bug in Flash. But Adobe would not fix it so it had to be worked around in libvdpau. But no, actually posting correct information goes against your pre-conceived notion that something must be wrong on "Linux" (for whatever definition you use for "Linux") side.

That was not the only and not even the most serious issue with VDPAU, but it's me who's shitposting. Right.

[duby229]

Rust this! Rust that! Rust everything! Geez talk about fixations!

Here's a word to the wise: Rust does not solve every problem. If it did there would be human beings walking on planet Mars and world hunger would be a thing of the past.

Of course you are correct that Rust can't grow food or terraform planets, but it definitely does solve many of the fundamental design flaws in C/C++.

[duby229]

That was not the only and not even the most serious issue with VDPAU, but it's me who's shitposting. Right.

VDPAU was stable as a rock. It's only problem is that it wasn't designed to handle all the decoding features used in many codecs and so it can't support many codecs.