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Comment by kcb | Hacker News Reader

There's no hardware video acceleration in browsers on linux.

Correct. Most people misunderstand this and think that hardware accelerated drawing is all what they need, but there's another element: decoding. No browsers support (officially) hw-accelerated video decoding on Linux. Compare CPU usage of 4K in-browser video playback on Win and on Linux, the difference is major. On Linux, one CPU core is almost maxed out when playing 4K, on Windows the CPU barely does anything.

You can patch Chromium but no distros ship it like that.

If you'd like I'm happy to provide references to Chromium and Firefox bugtrackers that support the above.

Eg.: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247

"Enable VAVDA by default on Linux for VA-API-assisted HW video decode

Currently there are no plans to do this"

That's horrible to know. How does something like the Chromecast do this then, if it is just a glorified browser?

Another good reason to pop out video. I hate watching it in the browser, I just want to send it to my preferred player.

There is in Firefox, but you have to force it via about:config because it's disabled by default.

Well, guess there is a reason for it being disabled by default - like compatiblity or stability?

Most likely patents. Firefox only has video acceleration on Windows if you have codecs installed already (because the codec people paid the patent license fees) and the acceleration relies entirely on the codec+driver combo.

Chrome ships libavcodec/ffmpeg bits because they've paid the license fees.

I think it's unstable. I had to disable it because it was causing frequent reboots that wouldn't stop until the computer was powered off long enough that the memory cleared out. Even if I booted into Windows after the forced reboot, it would still continually reboot. I don't know what the issue was, but it stopped after disabling hardware acceleration.

It doesn't work on linux installations I've had around. The experience of watching in-browser videos on linux is too poor to bother with (it's hot enough as is in an Australian summer). I either download (youtube-dl etc) or use my tablet (for smaller ad hoc things) instead.

What setting is this? Afaik there is hardware accelerated drawing, but no VAAPI. There used to be some kludge back when gstreamer was the backend, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work now we’re using FFmpeg.

Sorry you're right. I thought parent was refering to accelerated drawing, not decoding. That said, for my use case, this is all I need on a work laptop. My desktop CPU doesn't break a sweat on software decoding, so I'm not too bothered.

In my case, it is enabled by default in Chromium if you have a libva installed, which I think most desktop distros do.

This is blatantly false.

Unfortunately it isn’t. You need to patch chromium to get VAAPI support (the library that leverages the hardware decoding in your cpu/gpu), and firefox doesn’t support it at all. There is hardware accelerated drawing, but decoding is all done on the CPU for the most part. It’s even more of a mess when dealing with nvidia which has its own decoding library.

Ah, reading a sibling I see they mean decoding not just 3d acceleration. Indeed that is a pit, though youtube-dl and mpv do a pretty good job for a subset of content.

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