Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-80-VA-API-X11

[aphysically]

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.

[RahulSundaram]

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.

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.

[bvbfan]

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.

No, actually Flash player has a hardware accelerated video decoding before video switch to VP8/9. Also H.264 is hardware accelerated https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

[ms178]

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.

[TemplarGR]

Well, at least now KDE users will stop complaining. Though will the performance be actually improved, or is it token VAAPI support that with enough copies will end up as slow as software video?

[Klassic Six]

Enabling VAAPI under Wayland

In order to run it you need to:

• run Firefox under wayland compositor with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
• set widget.wayland-dmabuf-vaapi.enabled to true at about:config
• enable appropriate HW acceleration for Firefox (GL compositor or WebRender), verify that in about:support
• have libva installed (I have libva-2.6.0-0.1.fc31.x86_64 on Fedora)

You can verify that VA-API is enabled by running Firefox with MOZ_LOG="PlatformDecoderModule:5" env variable and check in the log output that VA-API is enabled and used.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1610199

[remenic]

Well, at least now KDE users will stop complaining.

KDE user here, but not sure what you're talking about. Video performance was never an issue for me, even on a core i5 750 that's more than a decade old. CPU usage could be lower for sure, but it's still fast enough for 1080p60.

[DanL]

Chrome patches don't appear to have someone or a vendor shepherding those changes through the iterations needed for an upstream merge.

It looks like someone has renewed the effort: https://chromium-review.googlesource.../src/+/2062356
Old patch: https://chromium-review.googlesource...m/src/+/532294

[birdie]

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.

Adobe Flash player supported HW video decoding acceleration via VDPAU many years ago (at least 7). It didn't gain any traction though and then everyone rushed to kill off Flash.