Firefox still does not support hardware encoding of videos on Linux. So when I watch Youtube videos my CPU usage goes through the roof and I cannot watch HD.
xkcd even made a comic about it: https://xkcd.com/619/
Check "How to force-enable blocked graphics features".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/upgrade-graphics-driver...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
The difference is that my tiny netbook APU doesn't get bogged at 100% while playing videos, on an otherwise DX 11 class GPU.
When I go to about:support I see "AzureCanvasAccelerated: 0" and "HW_COMPOSITING: Acceleration blocked by platform".
Setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true and restarting FF does not change that.
I tried it on 3 different machines with different graphic cards and different drivers and see the same behaviour on all 3.
But this indeed has nothing to do with video! This is layer compositing.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/force-enable-hardware...
On my case for the EEPC 1215B Brazos APU it worked, like everything in Linux there isn't a solution that makes all desktop users happy.
There is literally no support yet for any unix video decode APIs in Firefox. No VA-API, no VDPAU, no V4L2, no nothing.
Here's the bug for VAAPI: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727
There's a bounty for it: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hard...