Bug 928630

Summary:	chrome/chromium va-api support failing
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Ferry <freaky>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Chromium Project <chromium>
Status:	UNCONFIRMED ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	freaky, ionen, kangie
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Attachments:	dmidecode lspci vainfo chrome-gpu-status chrome-gpu-codecs

Description Ferry 2024-04-05 09:22:09 UTC

Hi,

I'm running KDE plasma (5) under wayland. There should be support for VA-API under wayland in chrome/chromium for a while now. This would allow me to playback HEVC as due to patent issues it's not done in software, but if the hardware supports it that should be used.

Whilst chrome://gpu shows that hardware decoding is enabled, the table that should list the codecs is empty. Can't playback HEVC either, just get audio with a black screen.

I'm using a XPS 15 9510 laptop which has an Intel GPU (in the CPU) with a nVidia card. It's fine if it just uses the Intel one.

With or without nvidia-drivers installed doesn't make a difference though.

Have posted in the forums, but no responses whatsoever and at a loss with regards to where to look next.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1167821-highlight-.html

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Ferry 2024-04-05 09:25:50 UTC

Created attachment 889509 [details]
dmidecode

Comment 2 Ferry 2024-04-05 09:26:01 UTC

Created attachment 889510 [details]
lspci

Comment 3 Ferry 2024-04-05 09:26:13 UTC

Created attachment 889511 [details]
vainfo

Comment 4 Ferry 2024-04-05 09:28:16 UTC

Created attachment 889512 [details]
chrome-gpu-status

Comment 5 Ferry 2024-04-05 09:28:40 UTC

Created attachment 889513 [details]
chrome-gpu-codecs

Comment 6 Matt Jolly gentoo-dev

2024-04-09 13:24:19 UTC

> I'm using a XPS 15 9510 laptop which has an Intel GPU
> (in the CPU) with a nVidia card. It's fine if it just uses the Intel one.

So VA-API works on wayland on your Intel?

If so that's not too surprising - VA-API is intel's open standard for this sort of thing.

I'm not actually sure if we expect this to work on nvidia (proprietary drivers), at least not out of the box - nvidia uses NVENC/NVDEC instead and I don't believe that they have VA-API support.

Comment 7 Ferry 2024-04-09 13:44:27 UTC

Hi,

yes va-api seems to work. The nVidia card is just supposed to offload heavy 3D to if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure how to troubleshoot this though.

Chrome should just use the Intel card. Have tried installing media-libs/nvidia-vaapi-driver, but that doesn't make a difference.

chromium didn't list any codecs either and seems firefox doesn't use hardware playback either.

No clue where it's breaking, vainfo seems fine.

There was a point, quite some time ago, it listed codecs just fine. HEVC playback was broken though (lots of green stuff and artifacts), AVC was fine. This is over a year ago though. It has been like this for quite some time now, but should be officially working now.

Might try if it works under Ubuntu live 24.04 or something.

Comment 8 Ionen Wolkens gentoo-dev

2024-04-09 14:19:57 UTC

nvidia-vaapi-driver only works with specific configurations[1] and is a bit of hack that acts as wrapper to nvdec (it's also not supported by nvidia itself) - consider yourself lucky if can get that to work at all

in general vaapi is not supported with nvidia, need to use vdpau or nvdec instead but this is typically not supported by web browsers (some media players can use them, e.g. mpv -hwdec=nvdec).

[1] https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/blob/master/README.md
tl;dr it says that chrome is not supported, this is primarily for use with firefox

Comment 9 Ferry 2024-04-23 08:10:03 UTC

It doesn't work without nVidia drivers either. It supposed to just use the intel drivers. That's also what's in the vainfo output.