Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

[gregzeng]

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

Market share matters very much. More clout, more developers, more third party coders, more add-ons & extensions, more & better alpha & beta testing, etc. In case you did not noitice, poor market sharte means eventual death.

[smitty3268]

If we are talking about an AMD video card or APU, then I would suspect that "real" hardware acceleration would leverage the capabilities of the onboard UVD.

"Fake" hardware acceleration might be said to simply use the main GPU chip.

To my knowledge(which is very limited here) the UVD is more efficient than than the GPU, and even vastly moreso than the CPU.

This is about using libVA, which is hooked up to UVD on AMD chips and whatever hardware other drivers expose through it on their hardware. So yes, it's "real".

I have no idea why this keeps coming up over and over again in all these articles. Are you the same person and just refusing to acknowledge the answers you're getting in each article? Or is this FUD spreading somehow?

[ezst036]

Huh? What is fake hardware acceleration?

If we are talking about an AMD video card or APU, then I would suspect that "real" hardware acceleration would leverage the capabilities of the onboard UVD.

"Fake" hardware acceleration might be said to simply use the main GPU chip.

To my knowledge(which is very limited here) the UVD is more efficient than than the GPU, and even vastly moreso than the CPU.

[horizonbrave]

Sorry I missed the memo and I'm dumb as fuck. What this brings to the table? Just a bit of power efficiency for laptop users??
Thanks

[bug77]

But xOrG iS abAndoNEd

144Hz

Please don't. It's strange enough he stayed away so far, do you dislike 5 pages of readable posts that much?

[240Hz]

But xOrG iS abAndoNEd

144Hz

[bug77]

Browsers have to convert the Video from YUV or whatever they get it in to RGB before displaying it, to be able to combine with media controls and other things they have. Native video players generally don't have to do that so the save a lot of processing.

This is what the conversion looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV#HDTV_with_BT.709
There's no way 9 multiplications and 6 additions need that much extra CPU time. Though back in the day, I remember Adobe complaining about YUV as well...

[brent]

Browsers have to convert the Video from YUV or whatever they get it in to RGB before displaying it, to be able to combine with media controls and other things they have. Native video players generally don't have to do that so the save a lot of processing.

This is pretty much completely wrong. Standalone video players need to convert to RGB too, of course. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to display it on your RGB display. And you also have OSD and subtitles in standalone video players, and these elements need to be composited with the video content. Browsers and standalone video players aren't actually very different at all.

Firefox' implementation of accelerated video playback uses VAAPI for decoding and OpenGL shaders for presentation and compositing, so in theory it should be just as efficient as mpv (< 10% CPU load), but it seems to have a ton of CPU overhead for whatever reason. It needs a lot of CPU cycles for things not strictly related to video decoding or presentation. Let's hope they'll sort that out.

[ernstp]

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.

Browsers have to convert the Video from YUV or whatever they get it in to RGB before displaying it, to be able to combine with media controls and other things they have. Native video players generally don't have to do that so the save a lot of processing.

[molecule-eye]

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.

This is what bugs me. I have old ARM hardware that runs 1080p60fps no problem, without dropping a frame, and yet performance on linux in a browser--on well supported hardware!--is dismal. This is why I still prefer using my old, fanless, cool, and quiet and underpowered tablet in bed over my way faster, more convenient, fan-spinning laptop for watching HD videos.