Facebook Videos Don't Play When Hardware Acceleration is Disabled

[roneru]

I disabled the Hardware Acceleration because Vivaldi uses the dedicated GPU most of the time. However, doing so makes Facebook videos (and possibly other sites, HTML5?) unplayable. Youtube works fine. Vimeo does not.

Any workarounds?

Version 1.10.829.3 (Official Build) (64-bit)

[xyzzy]

@roneru Sure. Enable hardware acceleration.

Seriously, the reason GPU acceleration was implemented in the first place is because it's better suited for performing some operations/workloads than the CPU thereby improving performance and (usually) power efficiency as well. The GPU also provides hardware support for decoding and rendering certain types of video.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome
(Sorry... this document is REALLY old but explains the rationale behind some design decisions)

The Chrome/Chromium teams are also actively reworking the GPU stack to gain additional performance improvements. It's really meant to be enabled and there's stuff that still doesn't quite work right with software-based rendering. (Some folks are really upset that their GPU driver has been blacklisted forcing their browser to use software-based rendering. Apparently, recent code changes have revealed GPU driver instability on some hardware.)

[roneru]

@xyzzy Ah, I see! This has been quite an eye-opener to me. I used to think that using the dedicated GPU is automatically equal to more battery consumption. Now that I know it can be other way around, and is part of something bigger in browsers, I have finally decided to embrace hardware acceleration.

Thank you!

[roneru]

@Gwen-Dragon It also does not work in 1.9 stable. Here's a sample video: https://www.facebook.com/9GAGCute/videos/672081616319576/

I recently just switched from Chrome to Vivaldi. Videos play well in Chrome even with hardware acceleration is disabled.

My concern has been addressed, but it's up to you whether you'd like to investigate more on this since it seems to be a bug (not really sure).

[xyzzy]

@roneru It also possible that this was fixed in last week's Chrome 58.0.3029.96 update but not yet in Vivaldi. Vivaldi 1.9 and the Vivaldi 1.10 snapshots are still currently based on Chromium 58.0.3029.82.

[roneru]

@Gwen-Dragon I got:

• macOS Sierra 10.12.4.
• Intel i7 2.8GHz (Skylake)
• AMD Radeon R9 M370x

It's MBP 15-inch mid-2015.

[roneru]

@xyzzy I checked my Chrome version, and I indeed got the latest version. That is odd though, because I could definitely play well even before that version was released (given that it was indeed released just last week).

[xyzzy]

@roneru I just tested with today's new Vivaldi 1.10.838.7 snapshot (based on Chromium 58.0.3029.97) on OS X 10.11.6. This video definitely does not play unless hardware acceleration is enabled.

Works fine either way with Chrome 58.0.3029.96... and also with Chrome 58.0.3029.110 that just got released this afternoon.