Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding

This is great news for nvidia users on Linux. It means that they don't need to install a VAAPI compatibility tool like nvidia-vaapi-driver. I also hope to see Vulkan Video supported in the open source userspace nvidia driver NVK soon too.

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Groxx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh sweet, now I can look forward to "compiling shaders..." on every website I visit!

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More seriously, I'm definitely curious to try this out on some of my weird computers. Sometimes vulkan support is noticeably more capable than other modes.

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pezezin 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Vulkan Video is about exposing the GPU's hardware encoding/decoding functionality through the standard Vulkan API, not about implementing the codecs through shaders.

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soganess an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are fairly mainstream devices with decent Vulkan support but poor hardware decode coverage for the codecs people actually get on the web. Polaris era Radeons have H.264 and HEVC decode, but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy. The Raspberry Pi 5 is another example: it has hardware HEVC decode, but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC, and Pi 5 does not advertise VP9 hardware decode.

	▲	Groxx 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yea, I'm most-hopeful for some of my lowest-end devices. Those as-cheap-as-possible CPUs tend to have a very strange set of accelerators for codecs.

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WhyNotHugo 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why does Firefox do first-class video decoding instead of offloading to, for example, ffmpeg?

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lousken 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hopefully, it will be in the next ESR