I read this article today, and tried to enable the hardware accelerated video decode in Google Chrome stable version 88.0.4324.96 installed from the third party section of the Software Center following its instructions.

How To Enable Hardware Accelerated Video Decode In Google Chrome

I haven't had any luck so far. My laptop is a Dell Inspirion 14 with a Core i7-7500U CPU and Intel HD Graphics 620 iGPU. I have libva ver 2.8.0, xorg-driver-video-intel ver 2.99.917, and mesalib ver 20.2.6 installed. I have tried with libva-intel-driver ver 2.3.0 both installed and removed. That didn't appear to make any difference.

Has anyone else had any luck getting accelerated video decoding to work, and if so what am I missing/not doing right?

DasJott that's information from 2018, google initially made hardware accelerated video available for the case of chromebooks and have only now extended that functionality to linux general.

As far as I understand if you follow the instructions right it should work on intel and amd (you'll need a couple of ugly patches to libva-vdpau-driver for it to work on nvidia). There are a couple of things on our end that may prevent it from working. Our libva and libva-intel-driver are outdated. Additionally, no one has bothered to package and test the intel-media-driver for Intel broadwell (required for coffeelake+) and newer (in the case that libva-intel-driver doesn't work for any reason).

I would try starting from zero, make sure libva-intel-driver libva-utils are installed and running vainfo to confirm hardware acceleration is available. Then recheck the steps for enablement is chrome.

edit: update got it working on the nvidia proprietary driver with a patched libva-vdpau-driver. I can push a few updates post sync today to hopefully help out a few people.

      joebonrichie thank you for pointing out that my info is outdated!
      Google should have never said never 😁

      Will try that as well now...

        joebonrichie Thanks for the information. I didn't have libva-utils installed last night when I tried this. I'll update my laptop when I get home today, install libva-intel-driver and libva-utils, and try again.

        Is there an article somewhere that explains how Mesa, libva, and the individual graphics cards manufacturer(Intel, AMD, and nVidia) drivers all work together? I know I don't have a very good understanding of what all the graphics software packages do.

          Just to follow up, this is working on my laptop. It was probably working after I first enabled it. What confused me is that the YouTube video I first tested on uses AV1 which the Intel HD 620 doesn't support, and which I didn't know at the time. Other videos that are encoded using H.264, H.265, VP8, and VP9 are being hardware accelerated. I installed the enhanced-h264ify Chrome extension and have it set to block AV1 videos. I haven't encountered any problems using enhanced-h264ify so far.

          a month later

          Hm, I tried it today and installed libva-intel-driver and libva-utils.
          When I run vainfo, it returns the following:

          libva info: VA-API version 1.8.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_5
libva error: /usr/lib64/dri/i965_drv_video.so init failed
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

          There seems to be something wrong...

          Just found this and think, that the driver is not yet available for Solus?
          It seems to be a special driver iHD for newest Intel graphic stuff...

          6 days later

          Are there any updates to that driver to be expected for Solus?