VA-API Video Acceleration On The Linux Desktop Is Nearly Ready For Chrome

[Hi-Angel]

Err, wait a second, how is that different from the VAAPI acceleration Chromium already have? I mean, really, Chromium have had VAAPI acceleration long ago, it just been disabled explicitly in the code. I've been using chromium-vaapiᴬᵁᴿ which enables it for quite some time with my r600g driver, works just fine.

[89c51]

Get your shit together mozilla

[carewolf]

It has been ready for a LOONG time, it has been enabled in the ChromeOS builds for years. Google just haven't really bothered to enable for desktop Linux, and when some of us have tried to upsteam it, the patches just been sitting unreviewed for years. I know of at least three patch sets enabling it, one of them mine.


Btw: It works perfectly for me with both NVidia and Intel drivers, and all generations of GPUs from either I have tried.

[Jumbotron]

Get your shit together mozilla

Yeah, bro.....telling a company with .001% of the revenue of Google to get their shit together. Why don't you get your shit together and start coding to help them ?

[eydee]

Putting so much effort to Intel to run stuff at 3 fps instead of 2 fps...

[Zan Lynx]

Get your shit together mozilla

I'm pretty sure that on Linux Firefox uses GStreamer for media. Install VAAPI for GStreamer and it should work.

[untore]

I have a 290, I don't watch videos on browsers really I tend to use mpv but I still don't use vaapi/vdpau because gpu fan starts getting noisy and powerdraw more than doubles (130W to 250W) whereas with cpu I only get a 20-30% bump and no extra noise and it never uses more than half a core anyway. yeah I am not dealing with that for a stupid video

[Gusar]

I'm pretty sure that on Linux Firefox uses GStreamer for media. Install VAAPI for GStreamer and it should work.

Firefox stopped using Gstreamer a while ago. And even when it did, it was far from as simple as "just install gstreamer-vaapi". A lot of people don't realize it's not just about decoding the video, it's also about rendering it and presenting it. Decoding the video is the easy part. Rendering it into a web page and then presenting the whole thing, that is far from easy. Firefox's presentation pipeline sucks (on Linux that is, on Windows it's *much* better, using Direct3D and DXVA2), gstreamer-vaapi didn't help at all because of that. There were also other problems, Mozilla never could get gstreamer to work well, that's why they dumped it in favor of using ffmpeg directly.

[aufkrawall]

Firefox' compositor runs like garbage on Windows with DX11 and Nvidia compared to Firefox on Linux with OGL on Intel IGP. They had to postpone VP9 hardware decoding for more than half a year because there was trouble with Nvidia. DXVA2 is btw. low quality since it introduces a blurred chroma channel and it wouldn't surprise me if scaling is done in 8 bit even for 10 bit content (enjoy the banding).

[Gusar]

Firefox' compositor runs like garbage on Windows with DX11 and Nvidia compared to Firefox on Linux with OGL on Intel IGP.

Ha, interesting if true. But isn't OGL compositing still off in Firefox and you have to force-enable it?

DXVA2 is btw. low quality since it introduces a blurred chroma channel

Aren't there settings in the Nvidia control panel to affect that? It's been a long time since I've been in Windows and/or used a Nvidia card, but I recall some kind of performance vs. quality video settings somewhere. But yeah, dxva2 sucks in terms of how much control an application has over the video, you're at the mercy of the GPU driver vendor. d3d11va is much better in this regard. I'll have to check what Firefox is actually using, whether it's just dxva2 or if there's d3d11va support too.

and it wouldn't surprise me if scaling is done in 8 bit even for 10 bit content (enjoy the banding).

That's for sure. Devs probably weren't thinking about 10bit video back then when dxva2 was created. Heck, even nowadays devs forget about 10bit video, for example Google created an ANGLE extension to import d3d11va surfaces into OpenGL for use in Chrome (mpv uses it too), and guess what, it's 8bit only. Which is extra eyeroll-worthy considering Google is pushing 10bit VP9 on youtube.