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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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...

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