Firefox Nightly Tries For VA-API Video Acceleration For Mesa Users

[oleid]

DEs in Linux barely support any GPUs in the world, I mean Windows has had its UI almost fully GPU accelerated since Windows Vista or something? What about Linux? Well, rendering using the CPU mostly.

Use GNOME. The desktop is GPU accelerated and since GTK4 apps are as well.

[nranger]

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Even Microsoft no longer plays that DRM game Windows 11 Media Player simply does not play BD anymore, and you need to buy the AV1 HEVC Codec in the Store to use it.
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Of course if you just want to watch youtube those restrictions dont apply to everthing but if it´s AV1 it may aswell dunno.

Umm, maybe I'm just mis-reading your comment, but the AV1 codec by the Alliance for Open Media is royalty free (doesn't prevent someone from selling a binary in a place like Microsoft Store). It was developed specifically to compete with HEVC (aka h.265) so home users and particularly large video sites like Youtube weren't paying millions in royalties to patent holders.

[piotrj3]

Given that 1) FFMEG's VA-API support is partial (while NVENC/NVDEC support is complete) (https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro), 2) OBS Studio hides VA-API encoding option in advanced options (and you can select NVENC right away) 3) some distros (checked Ubuntu and Arch) don't even enable FFMEG VA-API via --enable-vaapi configure flag, I'm inclined to think that VA-API is not that good.

To be honest I hate that VA-API was made at all, unless there is significant reason that VA-API is superior to VPDAU. VPDAU was 2 years earlier and still is updated (it supports AV1 on nvidia). Basicly Intel said, fuck you linux users enjoy more APIs so every aplication has to support 2 diffrent APIs because i said so.

Ironically decision nvidia made to basicly made nvdec/nvenc wasn't that bad for nvidia users, because at least software made for windows using those nvenc stuff works, I just hope once vulkan will be widespread enough there will be adoption of Vulkan video on side of windows so those stuff from windows work on linux in way "1 API to rule them all everywhere".

[puleglot]

Given that 1) FFMEG's VA-API support is partial (while NVENC/NVDEC support is complete) (https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro)

No. You probably misunderstood comparison table.

[mirmirmir]

It sucks to that don't have a proper vaapi support on Firefox. But it's not a missing functionality like some people here had said. It's not optimized? Sure, but videos play properly, thus missing functionality is not a correct words to use. I just want to point that out.

[treba]

Given that 1) FFMEG's VA-API support is partial (while NVENC/NVDEC support is complete) (https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro), 2) OBS Studio hides VA-API encoding option in advanced options (and you can select NVENC right away) 3) some distros (checked Ubuntu and Arch) don't even enable FFMEG VA-API via --enable-vaapi configure flag, I'm inclined to think that VA-API is not that good.

Encoding and decoding are two quite different things. I'm super happy to see decoding finally working properly (and being done in the sandboxed RDD process).
I don't expect hardware encoding coming anytime soon, given how unreliable it still appears to be - and the difficult legal issues. Here's the bugzilla entry for it, in case somebody is interested: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1658900

It will likely become easier once all sharing (both camera and desktop/windows) is done via dmabuf. For cameras that will be the case once Pipewire is used in webrtc. There's a pending MR here: https://chromium-review.googlesource.../src/+/3308882 But even with that there's still a bunch of stuff missing. However, using Pipewire will have the additional benefit of using libcamera under the hood, allowing a bunch of non-v4l2 cameras to be used, which is increasingly common in tablets etc.

[zerothruster]

3) some distros (checked Ubuntu and Arch) don't even enable FFMEG VA-API via --enable-vaapi configure flag, I'm inclined to think that VA-API is not that good.

In both ffmpeg-5 (Arch) and ffmpeg-4.4 (Ubuntu) it appears that the vaapi accelerators are enabled by default if the deps are present, I'm not running either of those, but if you try configuring them look at 'Enabled hwaccels' in the output from configure.

As always, random online documentation, particularly for ffmpeg, (in this case telling people to add --enable-vaapi) may not be up to date.

[sinepgib]

DEs don't support any GPUs at all because it's not their job.

Compositing windows is the main task of window managers, which are quite the central part of being a desktop environment. Guess what's very efficient and nice when done by the GPU...

And then to make it all worse there are multiple competing ways of doing the same thing and then often times things become deprecated and it takes ages for applications to switch to new things. VDPAU? Still working perfectly for 99.99% of video clips out there? Nah, let's create VAAPI because we can.

Oh, but how else would you get people who screams "Linux is about choice" happy if it's not by having 20 incompatible half-assed ways to do the same thing?

[Ermine]

DEs in Linux barely support any GPUs in the world, I mean Windows has had its UI almost fully GPU accelerated since Windows Vista or something? What about Linux? Well, rendering using the CPU mostly

I see activity on radeontop while doing stuff in Plasma. You need to prove your words.

VDPAU? Still working perfectly for 99.99% of video clips out there? Nah, let's create VAAPI because we can.

FYI, first release of VDPAU happened in 2009, while VA-API appeared in 2008.

[Ermine]

No. You probably misunderstood comparison table.

I see letter 'p', which stands for 'partial', in 'VA-API' row for 'AMD' and 'NVIDIA' columns. What could I misunderstand?

Actually I'd love to have VA-API fully supported, so I can reencode my stuff to HEVC quickly. I have chosen my card with this task in mind.