4 ms·

Still no hardware accelerated video for Linux :( Everytime Firefox releases something I am reminded of this: https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/

• s_kilk 10y ago
  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)
  • zlynx 10y ago
    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.
  • Jerry2 10y ago
    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.
    • Narishma 10y ago
      How do you do that?
      • xenithorb 10y ago
        You don't. The person that wrote that is mistaken. Hardware video decoding on Linux is not implemented.
    • xenithorb 10y ago
      Hardware video decoding does not work in linux period. It doesn't matter whether you play an mp4 or vp9 video.
      • shakna 10y ago
        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 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210729 [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726
        • stuaxo 10y ago
          Right, this explains why my laptop has been running at a steady 85c the last few days, back to chrome for a bit then.
• hashhar 10y ago
  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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876
  • kuschku 10y ago
    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.
    • hashhar 10y ago
      Reminds me of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23289157/how-to-use-hardware-acceleration-with-ffmpeg 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.
      • kuschku 10y ago
        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.
    • TekMol 10y ago
      On my laptop, Firefox cannot play any youtube video at the default resolution. Have to manually set it to 360p.
    • throwaway2048 10y ago
      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