Ubuntu Is Finally Looking At Shipping Accelerated Video Playback Support

[grok]

What about Firefox? (and Firefox 52 ESR)
If it supports that stuff now or in version n+1, good.
If it doesn't then well, I only really need hardware decoded video in Firefox where video is like 3x more CPU hungry / slower, not in standalone video players (or in totem/gstreamer, which I have no intention of running)

[eydee]

What about Firefox? (and Firefox 52 ESR)
If it supports that stuff now or in version n+1, good.
If it doesn't then well, I only really need hardware decoded video in Firefox where video is like 3x more CPU hungry / slower, not in standalone video players (or in totem/gstreamer, which I have no intention of running)

FF doesn't really have any kind of acceleration under linux, except what it has because of GTK. When it comes to watching videos, even crappy old Windows XP beats it. It's one of the reasons why people still keep installing XP on ancient hardware, instead of using some lightweight linux distro.

[fuzz]

FF doesn't really have any kind of acceleration under linux, except what it has because of GTK. When it comes to watching videos, even crappy old Windows XP beats it. It's one of the reasons why people still keep installing XP on ancient hardware, instead of using some lightweight linux distro.

I don't think this is true... on my Gentoo box I have no problems watching 4k youtube html5 videos with zero stuttering.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I don't think this is true... on my Gentoo box I have no problems watching 4k youtube html5 videos with zero stuttering.

Now try to watch YouTube on BayTrail-based Atom - even 1080p is stutter. With hardware accelerated decoding there obviously will be no issues with 1080p even with 60 fps content, but Firefox, Chrome and Opera does not support hardware accelerated decoding on Linux.

[caligula]

I don't think this is true... on my Gentoo box I have no problems watching 4k youtube html5 videos with zero stuttering.

Try 'about:support', scroll down to:
HW_COMPOSITING - blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
OPENGL_COMPOSITING - unavailable by default: Hardware compositing is disabled
WEBRENDER - unavailable by runtime: Build doesn't include WebRender

On top of that, your videos will have tearing. And also stuttering on a bit slower hardware. It's crap. Not many architectures and GPUs support videos nicely on Linux. Raspberry pi comes to mind, also Intel iGPU may work for 1080p. You get tearing even on 7700k / Ryzen 1800x and Geforce 1080 Ti. Go read mpv's wiki, they say it's black magic.

[caligula]

FF doesn't really have any kind of acceleration under linux, except what it has because of GTK. When it comes to watching videos, even crappy old Windows XP beats it. It's one of the reasons why people still keep installing XP on ancient hardware, instead of using some lightweight linux distro.

FWIW, I have stuttering video even on Ryzen 1800x / Geforce 750 when using mpv/mplayer/vlc. Neither nouveau or nvidia propietary blob provides good acceleration or tear free experience. Help appreaciated. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, and Gentoo. mpv shows tons of dropped frames with each second. libva/vdpau test stuff might crash when checking supported codecs.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

FWIW, I have stuttering video even on Ryzen 1800x / Geforce 750 when using mpv/mplayer/vlc. Neither nouveau or nvidia propietary blob provides good acceleration or tear free experience. Help appreaciated. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, and Gentoo. mpv shows tons of dropped frames with each second. libva/vdpau test stuff might crash when checking supported codecs.

Try vo=opengl hwdec=cuda in mpv's config.

[chithanh]

Try 'about:support', scroll down to:
HW_COMPOSITING - blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
OPENGL_COMPOSITING - unavailable by default: Hardware compositing is disabled
WEBRENDER - unavailable by runtime: Build doesn't include WebRender

Those are not related to video playback acceleration. Did you enable USE="hwaccel" when building firefox? This allows you to force more things to on, but beware of bugs.

[droidhacker]

Wait, are videos currently being decoded on the CPU or what? I don't remember needing to do anything special to get smooth full HD video playback, neither on Ubuntu nor on Fedora.

Clearly they are being decoded by CPU on ubuntu. Fedora (/Redhat) has had accelerated video decode by default for ages.
But here is the thing about it; it really doesn't take a high end CPU to get smooth playback any more. You can do smooth software decode HD video with a single Cortex A9 core.

Redhat's angle on the hardware video decode has to do with codec IP. If you hand the data off to the hardware to decode, then its legal because the hardware has a license for everything it can decode. If you do it in software though, then you have to start worrying about patent royalties, which they don't want to deal with any more than they have to.

[M@GOid]

FWIW, I have stuttering video even on Ryzen 1800x / Geforce 750 when using mpv/mplayer/vlc. Neither nouveau or nvidia propietary blob provides good acceleration or tear free experience. Help appreaciated. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, and Gentoo. mpv shows tons of dropped frames with each second. libva/vdpau test stuff might crash when checking supported codecs.

I use SMplayer as a frontend for Mplayer/MPV and it can be broken sometimes. VLC uses to work right if you leave the choice of acceleration in automatic. Anyway, with my Radeon GPUs, VDPAU works right, at least in Ubuntu. The package you need to have installed is "mesa-vdpau-drivers". Of course in this case you need Nouveau to use it.

Also, Intel's VA-API also works ok for me in SMplayer and VLC, on a old Ive Bridge i5 on a laptop.

Keep in mind that the acceleration works fine in vanilla H.264 videos. If you try something fancy like 10-bit-something H.264 video the acceleration might not work. Try to grab Big Buck Bunny samples to check, under Standart 2D section: http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/download.html

Edit: install the utility "vdpauinfo" to check your installation. It's very small and it will show what your card support. I think it work with the proprietary and opensource implementations of VDPAU.