Arch Linux

GeneralPoxter

Member

Registered: 2020-09-25

Posts: 60

[SOLVED] Hardware-accelerated video decode on chromium w/ NVIDIA+VDPAU

After noticing some stuttering when playing Youtube videos, I tried enabling hardware-accelerated video decode on my chromium browser following the instructions on the Arch wiki here.

I followed the setup course for a proprietary NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super user on XOrg with Chromium 87.

So far, I have everything set up such that my chrome://gpu reads as follows:
    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled
    OpenGL: Enabled
    Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Rasterization: Hardware accelerated on all pages
    Skia Renderer: Enabled
    Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Vulkan: Disabled
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

I have also installed the libva-vdpau-driver-chromium package from the AUR, set --use-gl=desktop in my chromium-flags.conf, and verified VDPAU by checking the output of vdpauinfo. I also believe VDPAU is configured properly on my system since running "grep -iE 'vdpau | dri driver' /var/log/Xorg.0.log" outputs "[     4.136] (II) NVIDIA(0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: nvidia".

With all that out of the way, I proceeded to test whether the hardware-accelerated video decode actually worked by playing multiple YouTube videos at 1080p and above. However, I noticed no perceivable improvement in performance and when I checked chrome://media-internals, the result for kVideoDecoderName is either "VpxVideoDecoer" or "Dav1dVideoDecoder", signifying that chromium is still running on in-software decoding.

I am not sure what I missed in this setup, since I went over them twice but to no avail. I also checked to see if this was a shared problem in the community, and found this unresolved issue on the chromium project page that might be related.

If any more experienced Arch + NVIDIA + chromium users can help with this, it will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Last edited by GeneralPoxter (2020-12-24 01:40:42)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,050

Re: [SOLVED] Hardware-accelerated video decode on chromium w/ NVIDIA+VDPAU

The ongoing hw acceleration thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244031
You'll need https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ha … ion_layers

And notice that youtube enforces VP9 and increasingly AV1,
https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify/issues/53
https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify/issues/62
https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify/issues/75

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GeneralPoxter

Member

Registered: 2020-09-25

Posts: 60

Re: [SOLVED] Hardware-accelerated video decode on chromium w/ NVIDIA+VDPAU

Thanks for the tips. I reasoned that the graphical issues I'm facing are not unique to Youtube, but prevalent throughout the browser experience, so I'll be closing this thread. I discuss these graphical issues more in depth in this thread here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=261947

EDIT:
I have taken the time to read some of the threads @seth linked above, and in short:
- A lot of YouTube videos are encoded in VP9
- Linux VAAPI w/ VDPAU backend does not support VP9 encodings (you can run 'vainfo' on your system to check)
- Many YouTube videos will not be hardware accelerated, even after following all the steps in the Arch Wiki

Last edited by GeneralPoxter (2020-12-24 01:43:05)