Questions[vaapi](ubuntu)

My hardware:

• Intel® Celeron(R) CPU J3455 @ 1.50GHz × 4
• Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 500 (APL 2)
• 7,4 GiB RAM
• Ubuntu 20.10 64-bit, X11

According to several articles on the internet, Firefox v81 / 82 enables vaapi hardware video acceleration on Linux by default.

Looking at about:config via Firefox, I can confirm that media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled is set to true and media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled is set to false.

I successfully installed the necessary drivers for my gpu via sudo apt-get install i965-va-driver vainfo, but Firefox still lacks hardware video acceleration when browsing Youtube (VP9). In addition, I also tried running Firefox via the terminal with the command MOZ_X11_EGL=1 firefox, which indeed starts Firefox, but without video acceleration (Youtube is still dropping a lot of frames).

vainfo:

MrSmith@MrSmith-NUC6CAYH:~$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.8.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_8
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.8 (libva 2.8.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver for Intel(R) Gen Graphics - 20.2.0 ()
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           : VAEntrypointEncPicture
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD

I read that it is necessary to switch to the new webrender in order to actually fully activate and use vaapi video acceleration. Is this true? If so, which about:config entry do I modify?

What am I missing here? How do I enable vaapi hardware video acceleration via Firefox for my Ubuntu 20.10 X11 installation?

is there any way to get chromium with vaapi on ubuntu 20.10?? I've tried snap version from candidate/vaapi channel and it does not work now but it worked about a month or so ago.

gpu: intel hd 620

I'd like to utilize my old netbook with the help of Kubuntu 20.04 to watch YouTube and write essays through "Google Documents."

After the Kubuntu installation, I tried to install chromium by using snap (candidate/vaapi) and proprietary nvidia-340 driver in order to enable hardware decoding.

During the installation of the Nvidia proprietary driver, I encountered the error:

nvidia-340 dpkg: error: version '-' has bad syntax: revision number is empty

By replacing KERNELS written in /var/lib/dpkg/info/nvidia-340.postinst file to CURRENT_KERNEL and subsequently executing dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-340, the problem was easily resolved. Thanks to Linux community.

Vapau hardware acceleration on VLC works well with low cpu usage.

However, in the case of Chrome, it was not as easy as before. It says on terminal like below.

[7873:7873:0601/140059.075024:ERROR:browser_switcher_service.cc(238)] XXX Init()
[8007:8007:0601/140103.101729:ERROR:vaapi_wrapper.cc(482)] vaInitialize failed: unknown libva error
[8007:8007:0601/140106.191463:ERROR:gl_context_glx.cc(227)] Couldn't make context current with X drawable.
[8007:8007:0601/140106.191708:ERROR:gpu_info_collector.cc(81)] gl::GLContext::MakeCurrent() failed
[8007:8007:0601/140106.191909:ERROR:gpu_info_collector.cc(208)] Could not create context for info collection.
[8007:8007:0601/140106.192123:ERROR:gpu_init.cc(66)] gpu::CollectGraphicsInfo failed.
[8007:8007:0601/140106.254424:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(159)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
[8119:8119:0601/140107.561057:ERROR:vaapi_wrapper.cc(468)] Could not get a valid VA display
[8091:7:0601/140107.821836:ERROR:command_buffer_proxy_impl.cc(125)] ContextResult::kTransientFailure: Failed to send GpuChannelMsg_CreateCommandBuffer.

And almost all of the "graphics feature status" in chrome://gpu/ has been changed to "software only, hardware acceleration unavailable".

And also chrome://gpu said:

Problem Detected

GPU compositing has been disabled, either via blacklist, about:flags or the command line. The browser will fall back to software compositing and hardware acceleration will be unavailable.

Disabled Features: gpu_compositing

I've googled around so much time, but I couldn't find a clear answer on the web.

I just guess it is related to libva (although I don't know what it is..).

The result of running vainfo is like below.

libva info: VA-API version 1.7.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

If anyone has experience in my situation, please give me feedback and shed a light on this.

A brief summary of my computer is as follows.

• Operating System: Kubuntu 20.04
• KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5
• Kernel Version: 5.4.0-33-generic
• Processors: 4 × Intel® Atom™ CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
• Graphics: C79 Geforce 9400M/Ion

My apt-get is currently complaining about unmet dependencies (and refuses to do anything until I fix them):

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libavcodec53 : Depends: libva1 (> 1.0.12~) but 0.31.1-1+sds4 is installed
 libva-dev : Depends: libva1 (>= 1.0.12) but 0.31.1-1+sds4 is installed
 libva-glx1 : Depends: libva1 (> 1.0.12~) but 0.31.1-1+sds4 is installed
 libva-tpi1 : Depends: libva1 (> 1.0.12~) but 0.31.1-1+sds4 is installed
 vainfo : Depends: libva1 (> 1.0.12~) but 0.31.1-1+sds4 is installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

The thing is, I absolutely need that specific version of libva1. Anything newer doesn't work with mplayer-vaapi. The purported unmet dependencies do not seem to have any negative effects on my system (other than breaking APT), so is there any way I can make apt-get ignore them and just do what it's told?

I can make VLC use hardware decoding with

vlc --ffmpeg-hw video.mkv

Is there an equivalent flag for mplayer?