Why is there no HW acceleration for youtube and other videos?

[Ankep]

720p Youtube in the browser takes more power/battery than a 4K video via VLC.
Now that all the world pretends to care about the climate while producing even more human offspring, it is time start using HW acceleration.

[edwardp]

@Ankep Settings -> Webpages Is Use Hardware Acceleration When Available checked?

[DoctorG]

@Ankep When you have no HWA, please give us more information.
Open vivaldi://gpu , copy all, paste here as code block.

Perhaps your GPU is older or not compatible to Chromium 118 core, and HWA is switched off.
Try to override GPU blocklist in Vivaldi by opening chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist in address field, set to "Enabled" and restart.

[Ankep]

@edwardp - yes, it is checked.
@DoctorG - before I try to override, is there a fast and easy way to check if the video/yt page is HW accelerated? (till now I tried to plot the power usage) - which is not limited to measuring a single vivaldi tab and may vary with content.

[DoctorG]

@Ankep check vivaldi://gpu and it shows you if HWA is active.

As a example my PC has this with my NVida GT 710 on Windows 11:

[Ankep]

The output of that is the same on my workstation with Nvidia RTX3050 and T15 laptop with Nvidia Quatro-something

[DoctorG]

@Ankep You see, video decoding is with HWA.

[Ankep]

@DoctorG - then the question must be: why is power consumption much higher with Vivaldi playing a simple YT video, than what a HD video. (and both both streaming via Wifi.)

[DoctorG]

@Ankep How do you measure this on Linux? I want to try.

[npro]

@DoctorG said in Why is there no HW acceleration for youtube and other videos?:

How do you measure this on Linux? I want to try.

this way... https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/90871/high-power-consumption-when-playing-youtube-in-vivaldi

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[Ankep]

yep, that reminds me that I've tried to get this to work before.

[Genre]

Not sure if this is related to your issue.
I had the same issue across multiple linux distros (manjaro, mint, ubuntu) on every browser that I tested.

I don't have an overly powerful machine but a Zen2 Ryzen 5 and an RTX 2060 and watching youtube videos on 10080 would stutter and drop frames. Watching the same videos on VLC was not an issue.
It would also affect electron apps like discord where just being in a voice chat would cause the voice chat to crackle.

My GPU drivers were correctly installed and HW acceleration was activated in every browser that I tested. Chrome, Firefox and I believe Brave.
I didn't test vivaldi though.

It would simply not work. I actually just went back to windows because of this because not being able to watch a video properly was a deal breaker. I researched this a little bit and there are a lot of threads on all kinds of forums talking about this issue and hw acceleration in browsers on linux just seems to be fundamentally broken for some people.