
Firefox 80 to Support VA-API Acceleration on X11 - caution
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-80-VA-API-X11
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onli
I think that will be great for old hardware. I have a very old Thinkpad R50e
here where Youtube did not work properly in the browser, at least not above
240p iirc, but you could download the video and watch it with vlc. The
difference was the hardware acceleration, and I specifically remember VA-API
(together with a second acceleration API?) as coming up at my research back
then and being disappointed the browser would not use it. So this could be a
nice improvement for a wide range of old devices.

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gridlockd
Those old devices are going to choke on rendering the Youtube HTML of 2020
instead.

~~~
djeiasbsbo
What I can recommend is invidious as an alternative frontend to the official
youtube website. It is free software and can be self -hosted but there are
also many public instances readily available (e.g. invidio.us). There are even
instances for I2P and Tor users. A similar thing called nitter also exists as
a substitute for twitter.

There are browser add ons and apps available which automatically redirect
youtube and twitter links to invidious and nitter!

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vesinisa
It would be awesome if this means Google Stadia is coming to FF on Linux. I
trialed the service and was very impressed with it, but ultimately decided
against a subscription since Chrome for Linux does not support Stadia due to
lack of HW acceleration (it runs but is unusably slow).

~~~
bryan_w
I use stadia on Linux just fine. You may want to check your chrome settings

~~~
vesinisa
Which distro are you on? Chromium has unstable VA-API support but most distros
don't ship it.

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filereaper
More context in these blog posts from the author of the patches:

[https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-
ac...](https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-
on-wayland/)

[https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-
fedor...](https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-
finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/)

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lokedhs
Finally. For a long time it has been quite embarrassing that playing video on
a modern laptop drain the battery like nothing else. Looking at the CPU usage
shows just how bad it is.

At the same time, mpv has been able to play the same videos for years with
hardware acceleration. The only reason FF hasn't implemented it was because
they were worried about it failing on some systems. Why they couldn't even
have enabled it using a flag I don't know.

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
Blows my mind that in 2020 we still can't take browser hw acceleration for a
given. I hate sounding like somebody owes me something, but... come on now.

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fulafel
Software is not a fast business, VA-API came around in 2007!

~~~
gridlockd
Perhaps, but this is just a nightmare intersection scenario: Desktop Linux
_and_ hardware acceleration _and_ proprietary drivers.

If you had supported this early, it would've given users nothing but trouble,
because of all the bugs. Then again, if _nobody_ supports it, nobody will use
it, bugs will not be found and fixed.

~~~
elFarto
Unfortunately this won't be supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It
requires them supporting DMA-BUF, which they can't due to those symbols being
marked as GPL. Even then, they don't support VA-API.

There is a library that maps VA-API to VDPAU (their other video acceleration
library), but that doesn't support DMA-BUF either.

I wouldn't hold your breath that this would ever be supported. It'll probably
be easier to modify Firefox to use NVDEC directly, given that FFMpeg already
supports that. But I don't think that'll be easy given their reliance on DMA-
BUF for composition.

~~~
bkor
It's not that they cannot use the GPL, they choose to not use GPL for their
driver. That's a business decision.

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dddddaviddddd
I wonder if this will improve performance for video chat in browsers. I've
tried Zoom in Firefox and Chrome on FreeBSD with modern hardware, but the
experience is very disappointing (about 5 fps, audio stutters, etc).

~~~
tsar9x
AFAIK no, as WebRTC is not in the scope of this work (similar story for
Wayland implemention).

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dependenttypes
Was anything similar supported on firefox on windows and if so when was it
implemented?

~~~
opencl
I don't know exactly when it was implemented but the Windows version has had
it for at least a few years.

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bitwize
To be honest I'm a bit surprised Firefox hasn't deprecated X11 support.

~~~
jorams
Why would they deprecate support for the primary display system used on Linux?

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bitwize
X11 is in hard maintenance mode. All developer effort is focused on Wayland.
Accordingly, if you are going to be adding new, advanced graphical features to
your browser or other program, it makes sense to support only the display
system where all the activity and support is. Plus, Wayland makes more sense
if you are a browser vendor worried about security implications.

ALSA is more widespread on Linux than PulseAudio, and that didn't stop Mozilla
from deprecating raw ALSA support for Firefox.

~~~
ciupicri
Not having sound is one thing, but not being to run Firefox at all would be
too much. There are desktop environments which don't run yet on Wayland. XFCE
is one of them.

~~~
bitwize
I didn't mean Mozilla would abandon X11 entirely, only cease developing new
features (like video acceleration) for it in preparation for eventual
abandonment.

I can totally see them beginning that process soon, like "tomorrow" soon.

