The way I understand it: Dedicated video players can build around hardware acceleration. They display a video and UI they control. Web browsers have to show oth

The way I understand it: Dedicated video players can build around hardware acceleration. They display a video and UI they control. Web browsers have to show other people's UIs, which can be dynamically resized, overlaid and otherwise modified. This makes it really hard to implement in current browser architectures without resorting to a solution that causes you to e.g. have to copy video frames from GPU memory to main memory, causing performance drops and stutter. With Wayland, it's "easier" to actually access the GPU's video frames directly (like on Windows and macOS), enabling this implementation.