Firefox 80 gets VA-API Acceleration on X11

[deleted]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-80-VA-API-X11

While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server.

The bits are now landed that VA-API support within Mozilla's Firefox web browser should be working fine on X11.

Bug #1619523 has tracked the VA-API status for X11 over the past several months since the Wayland support was squared away.

With the Firefox 80 release, everything should be set assuming you have a hardware + driver setup for the Video Acceleration API.

Firefox 80 is slated to debut at the end of August.

How cool is that?

Staudey

[deleted] How cool is that?

Way cool!

aleksvor

That should be very cool for devices with low-end CPUs and laptops working on a battery. In other cases there probably won't be a lot of benefits over conventional software decoders.

[deleted]

that's awesome!

putzerstammer

it can already be activated but is still beta about: config gfx.webrender.all The value false is set with a double click on true (or again false if it leads to problems)

aleksvor

putzerstammer
WebRender and VAAPI support are different things - the former is the GPU-accelerated renderer of the web pages (already available in stable releases, but needs to be enabled manually in about:config, as you said), and the latter is an interface for decoding video streams with GPU decoder (it will be available in Firefox 80, and will need to be enabled manually too).

DataDrake

About damn time.

Staudey

DataDrake Indeed, seeing as it is one of the more common complaints.