For NVIDIA users who want to enable hardware acceleration for Firefox video playback, NVIDIA VA-API driver released v0.0.14 few days ago with improved compatibility and various fixes.

As you may know, Firefox in Linux does NOT support NVDEC (NVIDIA Video Decoder) to accelerate video decoding. As a workaround, user may use the free open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver as VA-API implementation that uses NVDEC as a backend.

The driver requires NVIDIA devices with 470 and 500+ driver series, and it supports hardware decoding for AV1, H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9, MPEG-2, and VC-1 video codecs, while encoding is NOT supported.

The latest 0.0.14 release improved compatibility with the 545.29 and recent 575 drivers. And it fixed chroma errors at video top/bottom, H.264 video decode error, tiny webm rendering issue, as well as some crashes.

How to Install NVIDIA VA-API driver in Ubuntu Linux

Many Linux Distributions (e.g., Debian, Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Manjaro) include the nvidia-vaapi-driver package in their system repositories. Though, the package in Debian/Ubuntu repositories is always old.

NOTE: This driver so far does NOT work on Optimus laptop, see this bug report for details.

For the most recent version, you may download the source tarball via the link below and compile by yourself:

For Ubuntu, I’ve built the driver package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10 and 25.04 on amd64 and arm64/armhf platforms.

To add the PPA and install the driver, just open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/nvidia-vaapi
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-vaapi-driver vainfo

After installed the driver, you need to configure Firefox and setup environment variables to make it work. See either the project page or this step by step guide which also contains how to build it from source.

Uninstall:

If you installed the NVIDIA VA-API driver from PPA, then run the command below to uninstall:

sudo apt remove nvidia-vaapi-driver

Also run command to remove the PPA repository:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/nvidia-vaapi

For Linux Mint, either use Software Sources to add/remove PPA, or you need to run sudo apt update to manually refresh cache.