Arch Linux

SyXbiT

Member

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2008-06-28

Posts: 177

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How can you confirm a video is playing with hardware decoding (AMD)

My previous PC was intel/nvidia, and checking was trivial by loading up the nvidia control panel.
I recently built an AMD system (zen3/rdna2) and there is no control panel, and as far as I can tell, no way to tell if you're using HW decoding besides checking CPU usage.
I can confirm HW decoding works in mpv by comparing a 4k h265 video file with and without 'hwdec=auto' in mpv.conf. During playback it's obvious by just seeing CPU usage. That's a pretty lame way to tell though.

I'm using firefox on wayland. I recently noticed that on Youtube I'm getting av1 versions by default on most videos I watch. CPU usage seems very low, despite the fact that av1 is supposed to be very expensive to decode in software. How can I confirm it's decoding in hardware?