Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel

smartptr

Hey,
I saw some efforts of bringing hardware acceleration to chromium for intel based platforms. Do you think we (or I) can benefit any soon of the acceleration? I believe we must have discussed this on the forum previously, but I haven't found anything reassuring recently.

Today I fail to configure Vivaldi snapshot (or Chrome Beta) with any flags or settings on my Thinkpad (10th gen CPU) with Fedora 39, Wayland.

I see 'Video Decode: Hardware accelerated' in vivaldi://gpu features, but intel_gpu_top doesn't show any video activity when watching Youtube.
vivaldi://media-internals shows VpxVideoDecoder.

Thanks.

lfisk

@smartptr Last I heard was that Google/Chromium had it disabled See:

Previous Forum Discussion on this

mib3berlin

@smartptr
Hi, to my knowledge the "efforts" does not work anymore since Chromium 116, Vivaldi stable is at 118 now.
No browser support full hardware acceleration on Linux, testing Chrome, Edge, Firefox makes no difference on my systems.
YT video 720p use 5-8% of my CPU, specs in my signature.

Intel Top shows some activity:

Cheers, mib

smartptr

@mib3berlin , Firefox does make a difference on my system:

smartptr

@lfisk That's unfortunate.

mib3berlin

@smartptr
Aha, no difference on Opensuse Linux.
On my AMD system Vivaldi use 0.1% Cpu running a HD video full screen, with nvtop it show 10% GPU usage but the result is a bit strange.

npro

@mib3berlin said in Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel:

Firefox makes no difference on my systems

then you probably haven't configured it/them well, because Firefoxes do make a huge difference compared to Chromiums, for example with this video at 2160p60 4K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ , Vivaldi consumes ~35-40% of my -not so slow- AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU, while Firefoxes (Nightly or Floorp) around 5-9%.

npro

@smartptr said in Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel:

some efforts of bringing hardware acceleration to chromium for intel based platforms

Chromium on intel based platforms used to have (working) video HWA (and some newish might still have), these... "efforts" concern Ubuntu's snaps I assume.

smartptr

@npro yes, special chromium builds, released as snaps. But they say they integrated the results to the edge branch, if I read this correctly:

In the meantime, hardware accelerated Chromium made it to the official latest/edge and latest/beta channels with candidate and stable following later.

mib3berlin

@npro
I always test with clean profiles and latest stables.
The Video you linked takes 4-7% CPU on my AMD system, full screen on Firefox and Vivaldi.
I don't really care about, I can run 4 videos tiled and another 4K one on my second display and surf happily with 500 tabs without lags.
No idea why this not work for some users.

npro

@mib3berlin said in Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel:

The Video you linked takes 4-7% CPU on my AMD system, full screen on Firefox and Vivaldi.

Did you set the resolution to the max, 2160p60 4K ?

mib3berlin

@npro
No but I can see a difference if I do.
Firefox 15%
Vivaldi 25%
As I mention, i don't care if I can work flawless in a tool.
If not I change the tool.

Cheers, mib

npro

@mib3berlin said in Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel:

No but I can see a difference if I do.

Glad you did because that's the whole point, video hardware acceleration for Chromiums kicks-in with resolutions higher >720p

YT video 720p use 5-8% of my CPU*

@mib3berlin said in Video decoding hardware acceleration on intel:

As I mention, i don't care if I can work flawless in a tool.
If not I change the tool.

The question is not about you though with a fast CPU, but OP's laptop, where depending on his CPU your 25% could be 75% for him, essentially draining his battery very fast.

smartptr

Update.

These are the flags I set in the desktop file, and they enable video acceleration for me now:

/usr/bin/vivaldi-snapshot --gtk-version=4 --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL --use-gl=angle --use-angle=gl %U