Firefox 80 to Support VA-API Acceleration on X11 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 80 to Support VA-API Acceleration on X11

phoronix.com

91 pointscaution38 comments

I think that will be great for old hardware. I have a very old Thinkpad R50e here where Youtube did not work properly in the browser, at least not above 240p iirc, but you could download the video and watch it with vlc. The difference was the hardware acceleration, and I specifically remember VA-API (together with a second acceleration API?) as coming up at my research back then and being disappointed the browser would not use it. So this could be a nice improvement for a wide range of old devices.

Those old devices are going to choke on rendering the Youtube HTML of 2020 instead.

That's likely. But there is always hope for a new Feather project.

&disable_polymer=1

Automatic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polym...

What I can recommend is invidious as an alternative frontend to the official youtube website. It is free software and can be self -hosted but there are also many public instances readily available (e.g. invidio.us). There are even instances for I2P and Tor users. A similar thing called nitter also exists as a substitute for twitter.

There are browser add ons and apps available which automatically redirect youtube and twitter links to invidious and nitter!

No need to download, I was using youtube-dl piped to mplayer, now using mpv which has youtube-dl integrated.

Works wonders on old and not-so-old hardware that can't play 1080p or 4k in browser.

I'm using mpv with youtube-dl, too. It's also working on Windows and makes watching videos on dual monitor setups easier. Just place the youtube-dl.exe side-by-side with the mpv.exe.

youtube-dl supports a lot more websites than only YouTube, which makes it (in combination with mpv) a very nice tool that you just put all your videos into.

Do you have your browser set up to open youtube links like that? If so could you explain how you set it up?

I just put mpv into my PATH, open CMD/terminal, and copy and paste the video link. This takes maybe 5 seconds.

Ive been using Openwith on firefox and chrome, and it works flawlessly

It needs a launcher (aka native host client) to start the 3rd party app, in this case mpv with the correct arguments.

The launcher is technically only started (then immediatly terminates) when you trigger the openwith action, so no memory/cpu overhead.

The official openwith solution is a python script (requires python), for windows there is a native and lightweight launcher: owclauncher

With this setup, you can launch any action with a simple right click: play in mpv, play in low resolution in mpv, download video/audio with youtube-dl, play in 2nd screen ...

There's also play-with extension which doesn't require native client. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/

> mpv ... youtube-dl

I thought that was a fight club type secret that we're not supposed to share.

It would be awesome if this means Google Stadia is coming to FF on Linux. I trialed the service and was very impressed with it, but ultimately decided against a subscription since Chrome for Linux does not support Stadia due to lack of HW acceleration (it runs but is unusably slow).

Wait, somebody likes Stadia?

I know it was gutted at launch but I decided to try it anyways with open eyes since there was a 2-month free trial with some free games. I have fiber at home so latency and bandwidth is not at all an issue - on Chrome on Windows laptop the gaming experience was flawless and technically very impressive.

The value proposition of the service is in fact excellent for me. I game only sporadically, so investing in a highend gaming PC makes no sense - the hardware outdates too fast, and I anyway prefer to run Linux on my PC. I bought a PS4 but I prefer to play FPS games on a keyboard and mouse, and frankly most times I actually want to play the PS4 after months offline, I need to start with ~30 min worth of system updates before any game is even allowed to start (thanks DRM..)

With Stadia I pay one time fee for each game I want to play. Google offers for that fixed price always the latest, highest-end hardware and OS to play on. Contrast this to having to keep updating my PC hardware and maintaining a Windows installation just for gaming. If only it was working on Linux as well as Windows I would have certainly continued using it.

I use stadia on Linux just fine. You may want to check your chrome settings

Which distro are you on? Chromium has unstable VA-API support but most distros don't ship it.

I wonder what Chrome does on ChromeOS, does it have different media APIs?

More context in these blog posts from the author of the patches:

https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-ac...

https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor...

Finally. For a long time it has been quite embarrassing that playing video on a modern laptop drain the battery like nothing else. Looking at the CPU usage shows just how bad it is.

At the same time, mpv has been able to play the same videos for years with hardware acceleration. The only reason FF hasn't implemented it was because they were worried about it failing on some systems. Why they couldn't even have enabled it using a flag I don't know.

Blows my mind that in 2020 we still can't take browser hw acceleration for a given. I hate sounding like somebody owes me something, but... come on now.

Software is not a fast business, VA-API came around in 2007!

Perhaps, but this is just a nightmare intersection scenario: Desktop Linux and hardware acceleration and proprietary drivers.

If you had supported this early, it would've given users nothing but trouble, because of all the bugs. Then again, if nobody supports it, nobody will use it, bugs will not be found and fixed.

Unfortunately this won't be supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It requires them supporting DMA-BUF, which they can't due to those symbols being marked as GPL. Even then, they don't support VA-API.

There is a library that maps VA-API to VDPAU (their other video acceleration library), but that doesn't support DMA-BUF either.

I wouldn't hold your breath that this would ever be supported. It'll probably be easier to modify Firefox to use NVDEC directly, given that FFMpeg already supports that. But I don't think that'll be easy given their reliance on DMA-BUF for composition.

It's not that they cannot use the GPL, they choose to not use GPL for their driver. That's a business decision.

I don't think there is any non open source software involved here, it's Intel only though.

Edit: not so, see below

VA-API works fine on my AMD card using the mainline amdgpu driver. Buy your hardware with software support in mind and there won't be any problems.

Ah, I was going by the WP page. You are right. Also it seems the open source Nvidia driver supports this.

I wonder if this will improve performance for video chat in browsers. I've tried Zoom in Firefox and Chrome on FreeBSD with modern hardware, but the experience is very disappointing (about 5 fps, audio stutters, etc).

AFAIK no, as WebRTC is not in the scope of this work (similar story for Wayland implemention).

Was anything similar supported on firefox on windows and if so when was it implemented?

I don't know exactly when it was implemented but the Windows version has had it for at least a few years.

To be honest I'm a bit surprised Firefox hasn't deprecated X11 support.

Why would they deprecate support for the primary display system used on Linux?

X11 is in hard maintenance mode. All developer effort is focused on Wayland. Accordingly, if you are going to be adding new, advanced graphical features to your browser or other program, it makes sense to support only the display system where all the activity and support is. Plus, Wayland makes more sense if you are a browser vendor worried about security implications.

ALSA is more widespread on Linux than PulseAudio, and that didn't stop Mozilla from deprecating raw ALSA support for Firefox.

Not having sound is one thing, but not being to run Firefox at all would be too much. There are desktop environments which don't run yet on Wayland. XFCE is one of them.

I didn't mean Mozilla would abandon X11 entirely, only cease developing new features (like video acceleration) for it in preparation for eventual abandonment.

I can totally see them beginning that process soon, like "tomorrow" soon.

Wayland support still isn't considered complete: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

Though, in 2020, its working pretty well for me.

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