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

Potentially for the Mozilla Firefox 103 release we could see VA-API video acceleration for Linux users finally enabled by default while as of today has been flipped back on again in Firefox Nightly builds.

The long-running effort to enable video acceleration by default within Firefox on Linux is again trying to ship with VA-API enabled. This change as of yesterday enables VA-API on Firefox Nightly when using Mesa 21.0 or newer for its VA-API Gallium3D support. In turn it closes this tracker around VA-API by default.

We'll see for now if this Video Acceleration API support stays enabled for Firefox 103 or is kept off when moving past the alpha stage, we'll see.

The Mesa VA-API support works with the major open-source drivers, including AMD Radeon and Intel. There is also an experimental, third-party NVIDIA VA-API driver that maps over the NVIDIA's NVDEC video decode interface and designed to be used with Firefox for video acceleration.