Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

[deusexmachina]

Could easily be enabled in chromium too... They have some weird claim about how some edge cases make chromium unusable for some users - which doesn't make sense since those users could start chromium with a flag disabling it and/or chromium could come with VAAPI toggled off, yet still built in!

[marco-c]

I can't believe I get to see this happening in my life time. This feature is 10+ years late to arrive at the Linux desktop (in an official way). Too bad Firefox is only a shadow of its former glory in terms of market share. Chromium upstream would be the place this work needs to be, too.

As a user, what do you care about the market share? Why would you choose a browser based on its market share?

[xpris]

Is this the first time any Linux web browser has ever had official X11 hardware acceleration of video? I know there have been some unofficial patches for Chrome floating around that I think some downstream distributions applied.

First official support was in Brave Browser (ofc if we not count Flash plugins)

[andre30correia]

where are the ppl who said this is impossible thing ?

[timrichardson]

Gnome's Web/Epiphany actually has hardware decoding for a few years now.

And it is native wayland too. But so is Firefox apparently.

[arunbupathy]

This is great news, as it could bring some neat power savings to laptops. I tried using KDE wayland just so I can enable hardware accelerated video decoding in Firefox, but unfortunately wayland is not really usable for me with the clipboard and subsurface issues. So I am glad to hear this. I am mostly surfing youtube, and that reduces my laptop's (Acer Nitro 5 with R5 2500U) battery runtime to 2 hours and 15 mins, from 3 hours 30 mins when not at all having the browser open. Can't wait to test this out.

[sverris]

This is great news, as it could bring some neat power savings to laptops. I tried using KDE wayland just so I can enable hardware accelerated video decoding in Firefox, but unfortunately wayland is not really usable for me with the clipboard and subsurface issues. So I am glad to hear this. I am mostly surfing youtube, and that reduces my laptop's (Acer Nitro 5 with R5 2500U) battery runtime to 2 hours and 15 mins, from 3 hours 30 mins when not at all having the browser open. Can't wait to test this out.

In the meantime try the open-in-vlc-addon. I use this for YT-vids - it really saves battery runtime...

[caligula]

This is great news, as it could bring some neat power savings to laptops.

Not really. If you cared about power saving, you'd extract the video URL and just use MPV. I tried enabling the VA-API on Wayland & FF78 and the performance is still bad. I'd expect h264 to consume almost zero power since even the original single core 700 MHz RPi could play 1080p video without any issues. First 1080p video capable dual-core tablets and phones appeared around 8 years ago. With each new CPU generation they advertise how it consumes 50% less power while providing 50% more computational power. So basically the 8 year old 10W devices could do this, now you have 2**8 = 256 times better power efficiency.

[bug77]

Is this the first time any Linux web browser has ever had official X11 hardware acceleration of video? I know there have been some unofficial patches for Chrome floating around that I think some downstream distributions applied.

Apparently it's not the first time, but I can tell you, video decode performance is about the only reason I fire up Chromium every now and then. Even without proper decode, Chromium handles this way better than Firefox.

Both the X11 and Wayland support was contributed to Firefox by Red Hat. Chrome patches don't appear to have someone or a vendor shepherding those changes through the iterations needed for an upstream merge.

it's not a surprise that RedHat gives us good things, but a big thank you to all those involved :thumbsup:

[Vistaus]

Impossibru. According to a lot of Phoronix members, this would be a waste of time and resources and Mozilla wasn't working on this. So is this news real?