PLODDING TOWARDS ACCELERATION

Back in 2010, some enthusiastic fellow filed a bug at the Mozilla bugtracker asking for HTML5 video acceleration in Firefox. That seemed like a reasonable ask, seeing as it was already implemented for other platforms (well, Windows at least). The bug report was closed in 2019, but you can still read it at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ show_bug.cgi?id=563206. Or there’s another one, still open, at

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromiumbrowser/+bug/1424201. The first few responses show that this was never going to be an easy thing to implement. And our efforts over these two pages show that even with all the bits now in place (technically they’ve been there since Firefox 78), getting everything working is far from straightforward.

You might think that the situation was better in Chrome/Chromium,

and you would be right, but only just. VA-API acceleration for Linux did make it into Chromium via an unsupported patch in 2018, which was later included in some distro packages. The option has been available in official Chrome (and Brave, Vivaldi and Opera) since 2020, too. But

Chromium is only available as a Snap on Ubuntu. And guess what? That Snap doesn’t yet support VA-API. There’s an experimental build you can try with:

$ sudo snap install chromium --channel=candidate/vaapi

but we couldn’t make it work, even after starting with the –enablefeatures=VaapiVideoDecoder option and spending hours messing around in chrome://flags. The RPMfusion repos for Fedora host the

chromium-freeworld package, but we didn’t have time to go down another rabbit hole.