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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Still no hardware accelerated video for Linux :(

Everytime Firefox releases something I am reminded of this:

You can easily force enable it. But the stability varies wildly with hardware. My iGPU works good, my NVIDIA 920m works good but the old AMD 5750HD causes crashes.

Go to about:config and set: layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true.

BUG REPORT: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876

Nope, that's hardware accelerated layers and compositing.

Video is always decoded on CPU on Linux. Always. Eating, at 4K, around 5-10% on an i7-6700.

On a smaller laptop, this can eat an entire core, and make the browser close to unusable.

Reminds me of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23289157/how-to-use-hard....

The entire Linux graphics stack is fragmented and makes things worse for both users and developers.

The entire Linux world is fragmented. Luckily, things are getting better with systemd, wayland, etc, aiming to provide a simple and standardized way to interface with some parts of the system for developers.

On my laptop, Firefox cannot play any youtube video at the default resolution. Have to manually set it to 360p.

its not just that video is CPU decoded, MPV preforms massively better on slower systems, even with software only decoding.

Its just plain slower code for whatever reason

Both Firefox and mpv use the same decoder for Youtube (ffvp9). With accelerated layers forced on and fullscreen, you should see roughly comparable performance. For windowed, it's currently expected to be somewhat more taxing than mpv because all of the extra window contents are composited every frame.

I wonder if this is why battery and heat are so bad with Firefox on my Ubuntu 16.04 box? I've switched away to chromium because of the sheer difference in battery drain.

(And no, it's not a plugin that's causing the problem)

Are you letting random advertising Javascript run? I don't. Noscript disables most of that. My experience is that Chrome uses more battery than my Firefox, by a lot. Of course, Chrome is what I use when I just want a site to work, not have to wonder if I turned on enough Javascript.

If you watch a lot of Youtube, force the video to MP4 so your graphics card can decode it in hardware. Youtube defaults to VP9 but gfx cards rarely support that codec.

Google's wasting a lot of battery life by pushing VP9 onto everyone.

How do you do that?

You don't. The person that wrote that is mistaken. Hardware video decoding on Linux is not implemented.

Hardware video decoding does not work in linux period. It doesn't matter whether you play an mp4 or vp9 video.

Not sure what you mean by that.

It's true that Chrome/Chromium don't support it. [0]

Linux itself certainly supports it [1], and at least Mozilla have some progress towards it happening [2][3][4], if slow progress.

However, we used to have hardware video decoding via gstreamer and VLC within Firefox as plugins, using VAAPI and NPAPI, so it's still possible to get working today.

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729

[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726

Right, this explains why my laptop has been running at a steady 85c the last few days, back to chrome for a bit then.

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