Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding

phoronix.com

126 pointsBender24 comments

Oh sweet, now I can look forward to "compiling shaders..." on every website I visit!

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More seriously, I'm definitely curious to try this out on some of my weird computers. Sometimes vulkan support is noticeably more capable than other modes.

There are fairly mainstream devices with decent Vulkan support but poor hardware decode coverage for the codecs people actually get on the web. Polaris era Radeons have H.264 and HEVC decode, but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy. The Raspberry Pi 5 is another example: it has hardware HEVC decode, but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC, and Pi 5 does not advertise VP9 hardware decode.

Yea, I'm most-hopeful for some of my lowest-end devices. Those as-cheap-as-possible CPUs tend to have a very strange set of accelerators for codecs.

I think Vulkan Video is just another api to access those hardware decoders. It's not going to bring support for codecs to hardware without the support.

You are 100% right! My mistake. It is too late for me to edit my previous comment. But I appreciate the correction.

> Pi 5 does not advertise VP9 hardware decode

because it does not have it

I figured, but all I knew for certain was that it did not advertise it.

Maybe it was silently presented in silco but lacked the software bits. It's a pretty big omission considering the Pi5's release date.

On pi5 they even removed the hw accelerated h264 encoder. The soc used in raspberry pi is basically what scraps Broadcom allow them to have. For example it took to pi5 to add accelerated aes.

>but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy [...] but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC

I installed linux yesterday. Youtube doesn't let you backtrack to VP9 in the user profile setting. It serves AV1 by default now for all resolutions. Bummer if you're on older and/or low end hardware.

Maybe some browser extensions can force VP9?

I believe h264-ify still does. And many of the fancy "remake YouTube to not suck" extensions do as well.

>I believe h264-ify still does

To h264 yes, but not to VP9, no?

Yup, the name is a bit of a misnomer at this point: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/enhanced-h264...

What you really do is disallow everything save vp9...

Vulkan Video is about exposing the GPU's hardware encoding/decoding functionality through the standard Vulkan API, not about implementing the codecs through shaders.

This is great news for nvidia users on Linux. It means that they don't need to install a VAAPI compatibility tool like nvidia-vaapi-driver. I also hope to see Vulkan Video supported in the open source userspace nvidia driver NVK soon too.

Lets see if this works better than VA-API, I could never manage to make it work with Chrome or Firefox, on my now dead netbook.

Since the Flash plugin was gone, watching YT on that device was always software rendering, regardless of the magic incantations between VA-API and browser configuration flags.

Yea, both netbook-flavored machines I've got have been a struggle with VAAPI (and mostly giving up too). Definitely hoping for some success here, they actually do have vulkan drivers...

Question, what does this mean for Firefox users? Does this help YouTube Video playback? DRM'd content on Netflix?

It doesn’t mean anything for desktop users, it’s just a new standard that could have wider support than VAAPI since it’s part of Vulkan. Mostly embedded devices lacking VAAPI support today, though nvidia requires a third party implementation so this might improve that situation.

Why does Firefox do first-class video decoding instead of offloading to, for example, ffmpeg?

Look at the post. It's already using ffmpeg. This just enables it in the build.

Hopefully, it will be in the next ESR

It should be, unless there are new issues. This code change landed in Firefox 153 Nightly and 153 will become the next ESR version (July 21).

https://whattrainisitnow.com/release/?version=esr

Is it just me or were they a bit behind? Chromium already has it

Chromium does not have it.

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