7 ms·
Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL
- robtherobber 3mo agoWas there a link to the project on Github? I think that you've mistakenly shared Github's search tool/path
- DemiGuru 3mo agohttps://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-153-Downloads https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-153-Downloads
- sunaookami 3mo agoThat's not the final release, that's an RC and tech blogs should stop reporting this as final. There were instances in the past where the RC had critical bugs.
- pdpi 3mo agoAn RC justifies the "merges" title (compare "releases")
- sunaookami 3mo agoYeah but not the Phoronix one ("Firefox 153 Available", "Mozilla has uploaded the Firefox 153.0 release binaries today"). Shame because Phoronix was kinda good in the past.
- moebrowne 3mo agoHere's the Bugzilla link which was closed last month: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2021722 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2021722
- yonatan8070 3mo agoYup, it's pointing to https://github.com/search https://github.com/search
- cwillu 3mo agoI expect it's the https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amozilla-firefox%2Ffirefox+Vulkan+Video&type=commits&s=author-date&o=desc https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amozilla-firefox%2Ffirefox... link that phoronix used in lieu of linking to an actual github issue.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Havoc 3mo agoInteresting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu doing software decoding I had always assumed gpu would obviously be more efficient until I measured it
- ivanjermakov 3mo agoAll modern CPUs come with an iGPU, so it's unlikely to be software decoding. Just iGPU driver's decoder being more efficient than dGPU one.
- Latty 3mo ago"All" really isn't true, most AM4 Ryzen chips don't have iGPU (unless they are specificly APUs), and a lot of Intel chips have popular 'F' SKUs without an iGPU.
- wtallis 3mo agoThe iGPU's video decoder could even be drastically less efficient than the dGPU's decoder, and it would still be better to use the iGPU, because just powering up the PCIe link and VRAM for the dGPU costs far more power than the video decoding itself.
- mradalbert 3mo agoExactly, mpv logic causes it to pick up Nvidia for HW video even if renderer is on iGPU. There is special flag to choose device which solves the problem and Nvidia is kept down
- bgirard 3mo agoWhat makes you think the unaccelerated path would use the accelerated iGPU path? Typically hardware decoding is disabled because of driver/reliability issues and thus would switch to software decoding to sidestep these concerns.
- 3mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoPreviously: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Vulkan-Video-Merged https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Vulkan-Video-Merged (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439348)
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated: Firefox 153.0 Beta https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979110
- temp0826 3mo agoCool, have been using vulkan video decoding via mpv for a while now and it seems fine with little or no performance hits. Glad it's made its way here as getting hardware decoding to actually work in ff has felt like a house of cards (more options are welcome). Does something need to be done to enable/switch to it?
- adrian_b 3mo agoYes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux, with Firefox that was always an adventure, much more often not working than working (at least with an NVIDIA GPU). So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.
- Matl 3mo ago> Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?
- RamRodification 3mo agoBlacklist of what? I don't understand what a blacklist would be used for in this context. Specific unsupported hardware?
- prima-facie 3mo agoI understand this is important mainly for Nvidia GPUs. Is there any benefit at all for this (vs the existing VA-API) on Intel and AMD graphics? VA-API seems to work very well on both of these platforms, as far as I've tested.
- saibotk 3mo agoVA API has some caveats and also requires one to disable sandboxing of the media process.
- saibotk 3mo agoSorry my comment was related to the nvidia vaapi driver
- atomicUpdate 3mo agoConsidering Intel has vulkan video disabled in Mesa for recent chips, I’m guessing very little. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-Video-Disable-New https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-Video-Disable-New
- adrian_b 3mo agoNo, that is not true. That link says that only the Vulkan video encode functions have been disabled, due to bugs. Vulkan video decoding remains enabled also in the Intel GPU drivers.
- adrian_b 3mo agoIt is important in the sense that many Linux programs did not bother to support both the Intel video API and the NVIDIA video API, so they work only with the Intel video API, which is also supported by AMD GPUs. Programs that are converted to Vulkan should work with any GPUs. VA-API works very well with the GPUs that support it, while the NVIDIA video API also works very well with the GPUs that support it, i.e. the NVIDIA GPUs. The Vulkan video API has worked well for some time on NVIDIA, I switched my video player to it long ago. Eventually the Vulkan video API should work well on all GPUs, so there will be a unified video API on Linux.
- rdsubhas 3mo agoHow is the built-in website translation story in Firefox? To be honest, the only reason I'm forced to use Chrome is the way translate quite seamlessly works, both the detection (with mixed-language content in sites with English ads) and the actual translation. I did try Bergamot but that was a year ago, and the experience was not as good as Chrome...
- nagisa 3mo agoThere are a couple built-in ways you can translate, all of them fully local. First is the full page translation and another that allows you to translate a selection (from the context menu.) Fully local nature, of course, reduces the translation capabilities, but I found the quality to be good enough to very rarely need an external service.
- OuterVale 3mo agoReally good. I use it frequently and haven't had any reason to switch to an external offering. It can translate the whole page or just a snippet that you highlight.
- zeumo 3mo agoSupport for in-place website translations has been introduced in FF 118, initially for a handful of western languages, now 50 languages. There is also support for translating highlighted text and user text with about:translations. It's fully local, which means the translation might not be as good as what Google can do, but it's good enough to use, and in my experience it's usually faster, as there is no network latency (except for the first translation between a language pair, which takes a little while to download the weights).
- aboardRat4 3mo ago>How is the built-in website translation story in Firefox? It's broken. The button is there and is clickable, and there even is an animation near the address bar, but it doesn't actually do anything.
- JohnTHaller 3mo agoNote that Firefox 153 Stable and ESR are not released until tomorrow (Tuesday July 21). Mozilla generally uploads them to the servers the day before.
- Too 3mo agoDoes this mean that AV1 on Youtube will finally not melt my CPU, while my nvidia GPU is asleep, or is this just an enabler that will require more work to build upon?
- adrian_b 3mo agoIf the GPU is new enough to include a hardware AV1 decoder. For NVIDIA, that means Ampere or newer (RTX 30xx or newer). Turing or older (RTX 20xx or older) do not have support for AV1. Vulkan has the advantage of providing a unified interface for video decoding. Previously on Linux some programs were written to use only the Intel API or only the NVIDIA API. Fewer programs could use any of the 2 video APIs. (The AMD GPUs also supported the Intel API.) With Vulkan, the same program should work with any GPU. Vulkan has specific functions for different video codecs. To be able to use the hardware GPU support for AV1, the program that uses Vulkan for video decoding must also include support for AV1, i.e. it must invoke the corresponding Vulkan functions. For now, it is not clear if Firefox already includes support for all codecs. In the initial version they could have included only partial Vulkan support, for instance only for H.264 video decoding, with the intention to add complete Vulkan support in some future version.
- chaz6 3mo agoHopefully this will be supported on Intel Arc cards that have hardware encoding and decoding.