News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
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.
For Ubuntu machine with NVIDIA graphics card, here’s how to implement hardware acceleration for video playback in Firefox web browser.
Firefox so far only supports VA-API for GPU decoding to offload CPU and save power. Both Intel and AMD GPUs support VA-API. However, NVIDIA so far supports the api only through the open-source Nouveau driver.
If you have only NVIDIA GPU running with proprietary driver, then hardware video acceleration does not work out-of-the-box for Firefox.
For choice, there are libvdpau-va-gl1 driver (h.264 only) or libva-vdpau-driver, but both seems no longer updated. The best choice so far is the free open-source nvidia vaapi driver.
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This tutorial is going to show you how to enable hardware acceleration on Intel graphics cards using VDPAU driver.
VDPAU is an open-source library and API allows to video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware. If VDPAU available, CPU usage can be significantly lower.
Applications that uses VDPAU:
VDPAU is not available on Intel graphics cards. Fortunately, there’s an open-source project called libvdpau-va-gl, which is a VDPAU driver that uses OpenGL under the hood to accelerate drawing and scaling, and VA-API (if available) to accelerate video decoding. You can use it on some Intel chips.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one (Supports Ubuntu 13.10, 13.04, 12.10, 12.04).
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libvdpau-va-gl1
To install the VAAPI drivers for Intel HD Graphics:
sudo apt-get install i965-va-driver
To launch an application with the driver, for example, launch firefox:
VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl firefox
To force Adobe Flash to use the hardware acceleration:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/adobe
echo "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" | sudo tee /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
echo "OverrideGPUValidation=1" | sudo tee -a /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
To enable the driver for system-wide (not recommended):
sudo sed -i "s/^# \[/\[/g" /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20vdpau-va-gl
sudo sed -i "s/^# export/ export/g" /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20vdpau-va-gl
via: libvdpau-va-gl on Github | webupd8
