chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

richardm · 2025-05-23 02:50:28

Update to my last message. I'm closer to getting video acceleration on Wayland (still with Chrome running ozone=x11 however):

Throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it with these env vars:

__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1
__VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia
DRI_PRIME=pci-0000_03_00_0

...and these switches:

--enable-features=Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiVideoDecoder
--render-node-override=/dev/dri/renderD129

This finally gets me to...

Video Acceleration Information
==============================
Decoding                      : 
Decode h264 baseline          : 48x16 to 4096x4096 pixels
Decode h264 main              : 48x16 to 4096x4096 pixels
Decode h264 high              : 48x16 to 4096x4096 pixels
Decode vp8                    : 48x16 to 4096x4096 pixels
Decode vp9 profile0           : 128x128 to 8192x8192 pixels
Decode vp9 profile2           : 128x128 to 8192x8192 pixels
Decode hevc main              : 144x144 to 8192x8192 pixels
Decode hevc main 10           : 144x144 to 8192x8192 pixels
Decode hevc main still-picture: 144x144 to 8192x8192 pixels
Decode av1 profile main       : 128x128 to 8192x8192 pixels

First time seeing ANY decodes here with this GPU.

The catch? Most videos won't actually play.

00:00:01.881	pipeline_state	"kPlaying"
00:00:01.903	dimensions	"2560x1440"
00:00:01.903	kResolution	"2560x1440"
00:00:01.903	error	{"code":5,"data":{},"group":"DecoderStatus","message":"","stack":[{"file":"media/mojo/clients/mojo_video_decoder.cc","line":475}]}
00:00:01.903	error	"video decode error!"
00:00:02.572	error	{"cause":{"code":5,"data":{},"group":"DecoderStatus","message":"","stack":[{"file":"media/mojo/clients/mojo_video_decoder.cc","line":475}]},"code":24,"data":{},"group":"PipelineStatus","message":"","stack":[{"file":"media/renderers/video_renderer_impl.cc","line":596}]}
00:00:02.572	pipeline_state	"kStopping"

The breakthrough (if you call it that) was when I pointed vainfo at the nVidia with the correct arguments to make it work. LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME is the key that made h/w decodes appear in Chrome://GPU:

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/renderD129

and for the RX 570:

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/renderD128

I'll add that switcherooctl appears to omit LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME and also DRI_PRIME is insufficient by itself (on my setup at least).

Chrome remains unusable in native Wayland mode.

Last edited by richardm (2025-05-23 02:53:23)

Xephon · 2025-05-23 06:57:21

@richardm, could you please check hardware acceleration status on NVIDIA in the "media" tab in the devtools or in nvtop on your system?

I was trying to help to set-up video acceleration on NVIDIA https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305664
Despite Video Acceleration Information table in chrome://gpu was filled with codec information, videos were not accelerated.

richardm · 2025-05-24 01:03:33

Xephon wrote:

@richardm, could you please check hardware acceleration status on NVIDIA in the "media" tab in the devtools or in nvtop on your system?
I was trying to help to set-up video acceleration on NVIDIA https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305664
Despite Video Acceleration Information table in chrome://gpu was filled with codec information, videos were not accelerated.

IIRC I've not achieved successful video acceleration by the nVidia with any configuration or with any browser. Ever. Not even with Thorium. The closest is the above (posted yesterday) where chrome://gpu reports accelerations but videos won't play. I can tweak settings to where no acceleration is reported and videos play just fine albeit in CPU fallback. I went through that thread along with a number of others and also the Arch wiki and tried every switch and knob.

mpv works with no arm twisting; just hwdec=auto:

"Using hardware decoding (nvdec-copy)."

Chrome with the right arguments and envs *does* use the nVidia (sans h/w video decode) and it seems to work fine -- I can launch Chrome and observe the card waking up as evidenced by GPU VRAM in-use rising from ~3MB to ~200-300MB and also GPU + VRAM freq. rising from their idle floors of 210MHz and 405MHz respectively. The nVidia will remain asleep if I change Chrome's envs+arguments back to the radeon.

Chrome in ozone=wayland remains 100% unusable regardless of GPU selection, switches, arguments, or knobs. I either use x11/xwayland or else use Firefox (which ironically doesn't work in x11 mode).

seth · 2025-05-24 05:51:38

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardwa … ion_layers
afaik chromium only does vaapi

tekstryder · 2025-05-29 18:53:22

FYI: nVidia users on the 575 series drivers will need to build libva-nvidia-driver from current git master branch for hardware video decoding support.

All good with today's 575.57.08 New Feature Branch driver release + git master.

Hopefully "elFarto" will tag a new release shortly.

barnd3 · 2025-06-05 17:04:37

I use ungoogled-chromium and have set the following flags,

--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,AcceleratedVideoEncoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs --VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks --render-node-override=/dev/dri/renderD128
--enable-zero-copy --ignore-gpu-blocklist --ozone-platform-hint=x11 --ozone-platform=x11

When streaming I get this error message

[41426:41641:0605/185315.409964:ERROR:media/gpu/vaapi/vaapi_video_decoder.cc:1218] failed Initialize()ing the frame pool

the encoding field is empty...
What else can I do?

tekstryder · 2025-06-09 15:46:45

tekstryder wrote:

All good with today's 575.57.08 New Feature Branch driver release + git master.
Hopefully "elFarto" will tag a new release shortly.

And it is now so:

• https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi … ag/v0.0.14

Cheesemaster20 · 2025-07-09 12:37:31

My video acceleration works fine, but I'm getting micro stutters right before video starts playing in sites like reddit and twitter. Normal websites are smooth. It's noticeable when I'm scrolling with mouse. I'm using dwm (x11), i3 1315u cpu, gpu supports all codecs.

TheBigK · 2025-07-15 09:41:30

tekstryder wrote:

tekstryder wrote:
All good with today's 575.57.08 New Feature Branch driver release + git master.
Hopefully "elFarto" will tag a new release shortly.
And it is now so:
• https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi … ag/v0.0.14

But thats for firefox. Is there something u can make chromium work with this driver? In the doc it says not working with chrome currently.

tekstryder · 2025-07-16 20:18:57

TheBigK wrote:

Is there something u can make chromium work with this driver?

Works fine on chromium / brave.

• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 2#p2236902

Last edited by tekstryder (2025-07-16 20:19:19)

georgenistor · Yesterday 12:48:24

Hi,

I have an INTEL Series 2 - 265,
I have tried all the settings on this forum but I get only errors:
about some deprecation endpoints.

Does anyone have successfully set vaapi with Intel Ultra Series 2 iGPU?

Where could be the problem? Does intel-media-driver added support for iGPU from Intel Series 2?

ps:
- vainfo run fine.
- intel-media-va-driver-non-free/plucky,now 25.1.2+ds1-1ubuntu2 amd64 [installed]
VAAPI driver for the Intel GEN8+ Graphics family

logs:
MESA: warning: Driver does not support the 0x7d67 PCI ID.
[0717/181128.072977:ERROR:chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/util/linux/ptracer.cc:605] ptrace: Input/output error (5)
[0717/181128.074442:ERROR:chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/util/linux/ptracer.cc:605] ptrace: Input/output error (5)
[0717/181128.074688:ERROR:chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/util/linux/ptracer.cc:605] ptrace: Input/output error (5)
[0717/181128.074769:ERROR:chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/util/linux/ptracer.cc:605] ptrace: Input/output error (5)
[0717/181128.098194:ERROR:chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/snapshot/elf/elf_dynamic_array_reader.h:64] tag not found
[15904:15904:0717/181128.138680:ERROR:chromium/content/browser/gpu/gpu_process_host.cc:959] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: warning: Driver does not support the 0x7d67 PCI ID.
libGL error: glx: failed to create dri3 screen
libGL error: failed to load driver: iris

Last edited by georgenistor (Yesterday 15:12:46)

ashishv01 · Yesterday 17:41:26

I am experiencing 0% 'Video' engine utilization (as per intel_gpu_top) for hardware video decoding in all Chromium-based browsers (Google Chrome, Brave, Chromium native and Flatpak) on my Intel HD Graphics 620 (Kaby Lake / Gen9 iGPU) running Arch Linux with a Wayland session.

Despite vainfo confirming full VA-API capabilities for VP9 (the codec being played on YouTube) and the intel-media-driver (iHD) being loaded, and even with all relevant Chromium --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --ozone-platform=wayland flags and LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD environment variable applied, the dedicated video decode engine remains at 0%.

Crucially, Firefox successfully utilizes the 'Video' engine in intel_gpu_top for the same VP9 videos, demonstrating that the underlying system VA-API setup and Intel drivers are fully functional.

This points to a specific incompatibility or bug within the Chromium rendering engine's VA-API implementation with this particular Intel iGPU and Wayland setup on Arch Linux, rather than a system-wide driver issue.

PC Specs ():
OS: Arch Linux x86_64
`+oooo: Host: Latitude 7480
`+oooooo: Kernel: 6.12.35-1-lts
`/++++/+++++++: Shell: fish 4.0.2
`/++++++++++++++: Resolution: 1920x1080
`/+++ooooooooooooo/` DE: GNOME 48.3
./ooosssso++osssssso+` WM: Mutter
.oossssso-````/ossssss+` WM Theme: Adwaita
-osssssso. :ssssssso. Theme: Rose-Pine [GTK2/3]
:osssssss/ osssso+++. Icons: Tela-circle-purple [GTK2/3]
/ossssssss/ +ssssooo/- Terminal: alacritty
`/ossssso+/:- -:/+osssso+- CPU: Intel i5-7300U (4) @ 3.500GHz
`+sso+:-` `.-/+oso: GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620
`++:. `-/+/ Memory: 3213MiB / 7821MiB

georgenistor · Yesterday 21:07:39

It is solved. The problem was the vivaldi from snap.
I figure it out it should run because vlc had no problems.
I installed the vivaldi from homepage by getting the deb file and now it runs with vulkan options.
vivaldi --enable-features=Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiVideoDecoder

Sorry for the trouble.
But I can confirm it runs on intel ultra series 2 - 265.

georgenistor@george-intel-265:~$ apt list --installed | grep intel
firmware-intel-graphics/now 20250708-1 all [installed,local]
intel-media-va-driver/now 25.2.3+dfsg1-1 amd64 [installed,local]
intel-microcode/now 3.20250512.1 amd64 [installed,local]
libdrm-intel1/plucky,now 2.4.124+git2501180500.a7eb2c~oibaf~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
xserver-xorg-video-intel/plucky,now 2:2.99.917+git20210115-1build1 amd64 [installed,automatic]

georgenistor@george-intel-265:~$ apt list --installed | grep mesa
libegl-mesa0/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
libgl1-mesa-dri/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
libglu1-mesa/plucky,now 9.0.2-1.1build1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libglx-mesa0/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
mesa-libgallium/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
mesa-utils-bin/plucky,now 9.0.0-2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
mesa-utils/plucky,now 9.0.0-2 amd64 [installed]
mesa-va-drivers/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
mesa-vdpau-drivers/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]
mesa-vulkan-drivers/plucky,now 25.1.6~kisak1~p amd64 [installed,automatic]

Last edited by georgenistor (Yesterday 21:27:50)

Bzzz_56 · Yesterday 23:43:52

georgenistor wrote:

I installed the vivaldi from homepage by getting the deb file and now it runs with vulkan options.
vivaldi --enable-features=Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE,VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiVideoDecoder

I believe VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL is an old flag for vaapi upon opengl, it may not do anything here.

Arch Linux

#1151 2025-05-23 02:50:28

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1152 2025-05-23 06:57:21

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1153 2025-05-24 01:03:33

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1154 2025-05-24 05:51:38

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1155 2025-05-29 18:53:22

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1156 2025-06-05 17:04:37

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1157 2025-06-09 15:46:45

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1158 2025-07-09 12:37:31

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1159 2025-07-15 09:41:30

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1160 2025-07-16 20:18:57

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1161 Yesterday 12:48:24

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1162 Yesterday 17:41:26

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1163 Yesterday 21:07:39

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

#1164 Yesterday 23:43:52

Re: chromium: hardware video acceleration with VA-API

Board footer