Martin Stransky

Two years ago, the support was added? https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-… Also, enabled by default with Mesa in these days https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-acceleration-enable…

Thanks for this! I found another article by Martin Stransky who worked on this feature and gives more technical details: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/firefox-94-comes-with-egl-…

Firefox has enabled hardware acceleration in GNOME Shell by default as of versions 84 (X11) and 85 (Wayland), if you are using AMD or Intel graphics.[2] The feature is enabled in KDE Plasma and XFCE by default (X11 only) as of version 88, also for AMD and Intel graphics.[2] [1] https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/firefox-were-finally-getti… [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696495

That article is from 2021: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/firefox-were-finally-getti… Note the wordings like “for some Linux users”, “restricted to AMD/Intel graphics cards”. Also check the comments, there’re many other issues, with 4k on Intel GPUs, different desktop managers, and so on. I think if these MPEG4 standards were freely available, Linux kernel developers would come up with something better. For instance, V4L2 API portable across hardware, with a higher-level wrapper around it. If you look at MS Media Foundation docs, you’ll see portions of the API surface (like h264-specific media type attributes, or the bit stream, or the APIs for dealing with containers) taken directly from these ISO/IEC specs.

It's slightly more complex as there are some hardware/software combinations that don't work. This article gives some good steps to make sure it's enabled: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-… I've also had to disable media.ffvpx.enabled in previous versions to enable VA-API for more than just VP9 (I haven't yet been able to verify if it's needed for this one).

For me possibly the most interesting feature of this release is the possibility Of good GPU support on Gnu/Linux/Wayland. https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration…

If it is all so straightforward, what is your explanation for no web browser on Linux officially support video acceleration? Not Firefox, not Chrome, not Gnome Web, not Falkon, nothing. Despite video players just doing it. Just possibly, could it mean that it's actually not that straightforward in a browser? By the way, if you would read the actual base of the story here, you would know why it took Firefox's Wayland refactoring to actually pull this off [1]. [1]: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration…

The linked blog post makes it reasonably clear that this isn’t happening. https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration…

> While we're writing a wishlist, native Wayland support wouldn't go amiss. That goes for Firefox too! That will happen after it makes it's way into standard Firefox releases as Thunderbird is based off ESR. It is happening. See Martin's reply: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/firefox-on-wayland-update/… > Martin Stransky October 9, 2018 at 8:12 pm > Unfortunately Thunderbird 60 is based on Firefox 60ESR which misses lots of Wayland patches. > We can consider backport but I’d leave it on X11 for now and fine tune the patches on Firefox first. Overall progress can be monitored here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134 I have been wanting to switch from i3 to Sway for some time now and not have blurry fonts in Mozilla products. (That's what happens if you use them through XWayland).

Bang on! This just summarizes the experience of browser video hardware acceleration on Linux. Marred with bugs and incompatibility issues. Regressions are the norm for Firefox in this regard according to my experience using an Intel card. Since announcing support for HW video initially on Wayland, Firefox has been off to the races on this [0]. Despite requiring lots of hacks to enable flags as you linked on the Arch Wiki, one of which now suggests disabling the sandbox for content processes and a major red flag, it somehow worked. For one reason or another [1], Firefox chose to lock the video drivers to the old i965 drivers instead of choosing the newer iHD driver. A weird decision that still applies to current builds. There have been incompatibility issues with video codecs. In my experience I can play h264 videos with hardware acceleration but not vp9 with the flatpak distribution. With vanilla package, both h264 and vp9 video is hw accelerated. I could also have sworn that video acceleration support has gotten worse over time since the introduction. I now get a weird artifact at the bottom half of the screen only when watching YouTube videos. [2] Video hardware acceleration is not entirely doomed on Linux. Even if Chromium does not want to make any move toward this direction in this century. Gnome web or rather Epiphany has stellar video acceleration support by using Gstreamer plugins. So it is possible to get hw video working on a browser. [0]…