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

[mdedetrich]

As I said before, I see gpu activity on radeontop. So, I conclude that Qt accelerates its operations.

I can even show a video, but I don't know how to insert it here.

You are always going to have GPU activity because at some point you have to draw the pixels onto the screen and the GPU does that.

What GPU acceleration means (in a simplified manner) is that all of the maths regarding calculating the width, length, depth of shapes and stuff like animations is also done on GPU's where as in the old days it was done on CPU's.

[Ermine]

You are always going to have GPU activity because at some point you have to draw the pixels onto the screen and the GPU does that.

What GPU acceleration means (in a simplified manner) is that all of the maths regarding calculating the width, length, depth of shapes and stuff like animations is also done on GPU's where as in the old days it was done on CPU's.

I know what GPU acceleration mean. Radeontop in my tests shows shader-related activity, not just pushing buffers to the screen.

[erniv2]

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.

I was just venting anger yes AV1 is the new standard for youtube but even then you have to pay to get the codec.

And the main topic was va-api.

So why is va-api in such a state that it is still not considered stable, 10 years later, the reasons are that most of the codecs are closed source with wierd quirks for encryption , and that the hardware decode is closed source as well, heck even the basic kernel drivers are not stable AMDGPU ? lol tell that to my RX480 that was baking at 90°C a hole night because the driver overrides the bios settings and does not start the fans, or that nouveau driver, i just read a post the other day where a user suspected that reclocking killed his cards ram.

long story short those reverse enginering efforts may sound nice at 1st, but if things simply don´t work out, your hardware dies, the software crashes, or you just can´t watch the BD you bought for your 20 bucks.

It pisses users off.

[sinepgib]

I was just venting anger yes AV1 is the new standard for youtube but even then you have to pay to get the codec.

AFAIK AV1 is royalty free, and certainly Intel publishes periodically their own codec for it.

long story short those reverse enginering efforts may sound nice at 1st, but if things simply don´t work out, your hardware dies, the software crashes, or you just can´t watch the BD you bought for your 20 bucks.

Yep. Realistically speaking you can't get high quality software out of reverse engineering on spare time. Heck, even with official docs it tends to be rather hard to write performing drivers.

I have an Intel based based Mac thats 7 years old and have the exact same issue with the fans. Its one of the reasons I moved away from the Mac. From what I heard, this is largely a result of the Intel laptop CPU's being terrible for a like 6 years because Intel got complacent and was stuck at 14nm for a decade and because of that it became ridiculously hard to cool laptops if you wanted decent performance.

This is one of the things that really pissed off Apple terrible and one of the main reasons why they started building their own chips for laptops.

Maybe, but my Lenovo Thinkpad is an Intel with only the iGPU and I don't recall it being as much of a problem the few times I used it for Meets. I should check which generation each of them is tho, maybe that makes a differnece. The Intel Mac I have is a 2019 model, the Lenovo is an X1 Carbon 8th gen (which I bought under the wrong assumption it'd have one free slot to upgrade memory in the future despite having one soldered, so I'm an idiot; I expected expensive higher end laptops to at least provide me with that).

[Quackdoc]

I was just venting anger yes AV1 is the new standard for youtube but even then you have to pay to get the codec.

lmao I dunno who you paid but you got ripped off considering that the good av1 is encoders and decoders are free, even the one from microsoft is free.

[erniv2]

lmao I dunno who you paid but you got ripped off considering that the good av1 is encoders and decoders are free, even the one from microsoft is free.

No i paid 1€ in the store for the MS one

Anyway the hole va-api thing got drailed into wich UI has better hardware acceleration, the question still stands why is va-api ,10 years later, still not stable enough to be used as default as the hardware video decode api in web browsers.

The sugestion is that it can play everything on youtube, h.264, vp8, vp9, av1.

Discuss.

[oleid]

CPU activity is inevitable, what matters is how responsive, fast and fluid everything is. In my experience UI in Windows and MacOS is much better in all three aspects. Everything just "feels" faster.

Interesting. In my experience everything feels faster on Linux. But then I was always using hardware with great OSS video drivers, not Hardware which requires any proprietary ones.

[middy]

No i paid 1€ in the store for the MS one

Anyway the hole va-api thing got drailed into wich UI has better hardware acceleration, the question still stands why is va-api ,10 years later, still not stable enough to be used as default as the hardware video decode api in web browsers.

The sugestion is that it can play everything on youtube, h.264, vp8, vp9, av1.

Discuss.

https://www.extremetech.com/computin...odec-this-fall && https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

or just use mpv for windows: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/mpv

[Quackdoc]

No i paid 1€ in the store for the MS one

Anyway the hole va-api thing got drailed into wich UI has better hardware acceleration, the question still stands why is va-api ,10 years later, still not stable enough to be used as default as the hardware video decode api in web browsers.

The sugestion is that it can play everything on youtube, h.264, vp8, vp9, av1.

Discuss.

if you paid for it you got a fake one lol, it's a free codec. vaapi is stable enough, good apps have no problems with it

[tildearrow]

And do you think Chrome / Chromium based browsers are better than this? I think they're all much worse in supporting Linux. Their VAAPI support is much more abysmal, their startup time is much slower on Linux than on Windows (at least it seems like Mozilla optimized Firefox startup time on Linux within the last year, so now it's more or less comparable to Windows). And Wayland support is also more mature in Firefox.

Nope, I have not said or thought this. I may or may not agree about the startup time (it's not that much faster on macOS or Windows except that later versions did get worse) though.