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

[phoronix]

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

It looks like Chrome on the Linux desktop could finally be seeing Intel GPU video acceleration support with the web browser having patches pending for VA-API...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-VA-API-Nears

[M@GOid]

Software decoding (especially VP9) has come a long way, because my weak Athlon 5150 APU (Jaguar) can now watch 1080p videos on Youtube, something it didn't do when VP9 came. But will be a lot nicer if the decoding part can be done efficiently on the GPU, using H264ify.

[starshipeleven]

That's great. Long overdue...

[xpris]

Great news. Now we have unofficial Chromium DEV build for Ubuntu to allow us to use hardware acceleration with GPU in Chromium and it work nice on intel gpu and radeon gpu (Im not tested on nvidia). Download here: https://answers.launchpad.net/~saiar...u/chromium-dev I hope, this official Chrome/Chromium start also working nice like this unofficial build.

BTW. anyone know if they have plans to enable it also for Radeon GPU?

[jf33]

Now, if only Firefox had VA-API support...

[starshipeleven]

BTW. anyone know if they have plans to enable it also for Radeon GPU?

Is VAAPi different for Intel or for Radeon? Isn't the point of VAAPI making a standardized implementation?

I thought they said they tested this only on Intel, so there might be bugs on Radeon side, but it should theoretically work fine.

[Gusar]

Is VAAPi different for Intel or for Radeon? Isn't the point of VAAPI making a standardized implementation?

It depends on how it's being used. EGL interop only works on Intel, because it is designed around how Intel hardware works. Currently libva-2.0 is in development, part of it is a proposal for a more flexible API that would allow EGL interop also on Radeon.

Then there's the ability to output hardware decoded video to an X11 window or a pixmap, Radeon VAAPI does have that, but this is good mainly for direct display (like a dedicated video player), not for integration into a complex UI that is a web page. It's also tied to X, obviously, so not ideal also from this perspective.

[aufkrawall]

It depends on how it's being used. EGL interop only works on Intel, because it is designed around how Intel hardware works.

What happens when you try to use x11egl OGL backend in mpv 0.26.0 and ffmpeg 3.3.2 on Mesa 17.1.5 with Radeon?

[Gusar]

What happens when you try to use x11egl OGL backend in mpv 0.26.0 and ffmpeg 3.3.2 on Mesa 17.1.5 with Radeon?

No clue. Probably fails to load and falls back to software decoding. Earlier mpv versions would fall back to GLX interop, which is a hack basically (the video is output to an in-memory pixmap which is then bound to a texture with GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, the extension that was created for compositors), but with 0.26, GLX interop loads only when you explicitly request it on the commandline.

If you want to use the opengl video output with hardware decoding on Radeon, VDPAU is probably the better option.

[Masush5]

What happens when you try to use x11egl OGL backend in mpv 0.26.0 and ffmpeg 3.3.2 on Mesa 17.1.5 with Radeon?

Since mpv 0.26 opengl output + vaapi decoding does not work anymore on Gallium and it falls back to software decoding.