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HW acceleration on Linux is a mixed bag. You have to ensure that it is always working. If it's not broken in the browser (am looking at you Chromium, with a sli
by Timber-6539 3y ago
HW acceleration on Linux is a mixed bag. You have to ensure that it is always working. If it's not broken in the browser (am looking at you Chromium, with a slight side eye to Firefox) then your GPU might not support the video codec requested by the video service.
In my case, I have hardware that supports HW accel for avc and other "legacy" codecs but not av1. Which YouTube likes to use randomly and the only way to confirm if they are using it is by checking the video stats on YouTube. There are ways to disable the browser from requesting av1 from YouTube but I stopped using the official interface in favor of other privacy-respecting clients which to my knowledge don't request av1.
- vladvasiliu 3y agoI'm pretty sure it was using hardware acceleration since the cpu usage was so low. Using mpv and forcing it to use the CPU has it jump to something like 20-25%.
- Timber-6539 3y agoIn my case with Intel hardware, how I make 100% sure that it's activated is using a program called intel-gpu-tools, with it if you run intel_gpu_top as root you'll get the video acceleration stats shown to you. Pretty sure Nvidia has something similar but am not sure about AMD.
- vladvasiliu 3y agoThere's radeontop, but it doesn't seem to say anything about video acceleration. mpv does say what it uses and complains when you ask it to do something unsupported, and since there's a clear difference in CPU usage between hardware and software decoding, I figure CPU use is a good enough indicator.