The feature does not currently seem to work on Nvidia hardware.

For Intel gpu video codec support see this matrix. To confirm this in YouTube right click the video and click ‘stats for nerds’ to ensure the video codec used can be accelerated by your gpu. This extension lets you control what codecs YouTube uses. This feature is also possible to enable on x11 as mentioned below (I’d recommend wayland since I have found x11 to perform much worse with this feature).Ī not linux-specific issue is that YouTube will try to play video codecs that are not hardware accelerated by your device. You may also have luck with Firefox’s legacy OpenGL renderer. WebRender is Firefox’s hardware accelerated rendering, which is needed for video decoding. Note on relatively modern Intel and AMD hardware these are usually enabled by default. If the feature isn’t working navigate to about:support and ensure you see the following values. If the video bar is above 0% the feature is working.Īs a general test you can compare cpu usage when this feature is enabled vs disabled. On Intel hardware, test the feature by running the following : Enables hardware decoding for WebRTC, which is used on web based video conferencing apps. This currently breaks accelerated VP8/VP9 video decoding. Needed due to Firefox trying to put some video decoding in a remote video process. Disables the internal software decoders for VP8/VP9, which currently overrule hardware accelerated video. Navigate to about:config in Firefox and set the following flags: This may not be necessary, but I found it necessary on a fresh 21.04 install (I didn’t check off the box to third party drivers during installation). Older Ubuntu versions and other distros may need additional steps as mentioned below.Įnsure all media codecs and libraries are installed with sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras. Here are steps for Ubuntu 21.04, for devices with Intel and AMD graphics (Nvidia is problematic). For me this feature is the difference between 4k web video being playable or not at all. While the feature is not perfect, I have been reliably using it for several months now on various distros. This saves power, improves thermals and reduces fan noise, all while ensuring computer resources are more free to do other things while watching video. Hardware video decoding in Firefox greatly reduces CPU usage when watching video. Ubuntu 21.04’s switch to wayland luckily makes this feature more accessible and easier to enable. In this past year there has been work to make Firefox hardware decode video on Linux.

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