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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

What about Firefox? Video playback from Youtube on FF is plain terrible; 720p is barely acceptable in full screen for technical videos (forget movies) and 1080p stutters like a kangaroo with parkinson. The same videos play perfectly under LibreElec/Kodi, but due to recent crazy restriction by Google, one is forced to sign up with them to watch videos on YT Kodi addons, while browsers are still ok (for now). Also, Firefox (which I refuse to swap with anything) crashes like 1 in 3 times when I fast forward or backward the video. I keep the crash reporting on so FF devs are likely inundated by reports about the problem, which happens on a stock RPi4 with stock Raspbian and stock Firefox. All constantly updated.

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firefox 80 shipped late August & is the first with Linux gpu support under x. wayland was already supported, it seems, since 75.

81 is three weeks old & is the first release that will have Linux video gpu support enabled by default. source: https://9to5linux.com/firefox-81-enters-beta-gpu-acceleratio...

note that this is firefox at large. no idea whether the pi supports the standard va-api acceleration interface or what other potential blockers the pi has.

Thanks for this comment.

Question-- how exactly does one check that gpu-acceleration is on in FF? I'm running nightly on a NUC with Intel Iris GPU and it seems to be faster than LTS from Debian Bullseye, but I'd like to be sure...

Try running `firefox MOZ_LOG=PlatformDecoderModule:5`, navigating to a video and checking that the decode is being done though VA-API. Depending on your GPU, you might have to use something like enhanced-264ify to force Youtube to use formats that are supported by hardware decode.

More info here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Hardware_video_...

Last week, I tried this on an AMD 3400g (Vega 11 amdgpu) with that specific environment variable and my results were: - vainfo told me it (VA-API) can decode vp9 and h264 among others - mpv plays vp9 and h264 using vaapi - firefox log mentions using VA-API in h264 playback but in vp9 nothing related is printed

Maybe firefox whitelisted only h264 for hw decode?

Thanks for the tip. I think you meant `MOZ_LOG=PlatformDecoderModule:5 firefox`. When I run that with Firefox 81.0 I get this when I open Youtube:

[Child 78229: Main Thread]: D/PlatformDecoderModule VA-API FFmpeg is disabled by platform [Child 78229: Main Thread]: D/PlatformDecoderModule Sandbox decoder rejects requested type

Same in Nightly 82.0b9.

This is on a Dell XPS 13 amd64 with Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics (ICL GT1) running Ubuntu running Wayland.

I haven't tested my RPI4 yet. But if Intel graphics aren't a "supported platform," it's difficult to imagine any graphics under Linux that would be.

Didn't test trying to force-enable because we're talking about supported platforms.

It just has libva support for video decoding acceleration.

Whether that translates to actual video decoding acceleration on any platform depends on availability of libva backends. And performance (or power consumption) may still suck, if you can't use the frame buffers directly for output to some HW overlay.

Linux kernel APIs are fairly straightforward, and easy to use, if you use them directly from some simple app. But making it work across all the abstractions from browser, to compositor, to display server, via ffmpeg, via libva, etc. is not easy at all.

I haven't tried it on a pi,but mpv (having youtube-dl installed) is my to-go tool for watching youtube videos, since google wants me to sign in or accept its tracking to see them otherwise.

I haven't tried it on a pi, you might have to specify --hwdec or some variation of it to have really smooth playback, otherwise it's as simple as `mpv "url"`.

I was surprised at how much better (more fluid, less stuttering, fewer artifacts) mpv was compared to VLC with hardware rendering enabled on Linux.

You can also open Youtube URLs in VLC. Haven't tested the performance on a pi though.

Thanks, I'm currently testing Minitube (https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube/) which uses the MPV library and seems not to have some problems experienced with MPV (permissions, unrecognized format, etc). Still have to test it on the RPi though, so I have no idea how fast will do compared to the browser, but at least the crash problems would be solved. I'm afraid it won't last long, however: Google is locking access to more and more resources behind signup walls, which is a turn off for many people, including myself. Hopefully content creators will move elsewhere.

How about VLC?

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