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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.

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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.

How do you do that?

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

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