Chrome 73 Enabling The Mojo Video Decoders For Linux

The upcoming Chrome 72 release enables the "Mojo Video Decoders" by default on Windows while that milestone is set to be realized for Linux systems with the following Chrome 73 web-browser update.

Mojo Video Decoders? This work hasn't been talked about by Google as much as many of their other web browser efforts. In fact, I wasn't even familiar with it until a Phoronix reader (h/t Tim R) pointed out a patch enabling this next-gen video decode code for Linux desktop systems. Since just before the holidays, the Chrome/Chromium code enabled Mojo Video Decoders by default on Linux systems.

Since early November, the Mojo video decoders were enabled for Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS. But because of the timing, the default enabling for those other platforms wound up in Chrome 72 with that branching at the end of November while this Linux default change came in December and thus on the books for Chrome 73.

Mojo has for several years now been the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used by Chrome. Or more specifically, an abstraction for IPC primitives, message format, and library for message passing inter- and intra- process. The Mojo Video Decoder work is part of their effort on a new VDA layer (VDAv2) for video decode and moving the video decoder implementation to the GPU process. Details on that via this tracker bug.

Long story short, low-level video work to hopefully improve the video playback experience within Chrome. Chrome/Chromium video playback on Linux has long been on the back-burner (or at least how it feels by many Linux desktop users) with bugs like this, so hopefully switching over to MojoVideoDecoder on Linux will allow for making further Linux video improvements in 2019.