Harness your hardware for smoother streaming
Use your fancy graphics card to decode videos and free up your CPU for your other calculations and compositions.
S
ince browsing the web constitutes a great deal of most people’s computing time, we
thought we’d see if we could find any subtle differences between each distro’s out-of-the-box
Firefox
configuration. We’ve said before that
Firefox
can be made smoother by enabling the WebRender backend and activating VA-API for hardwareaccelerated video decoding. But getting this to work in the real world takes a bit of trial and error.
Both distros ship Firefox 93, and if you do a fresh install of Ubuntu this uses Mozilla’s Snap. Users upgrading from previous Ubuntus will get the DEB version from the repos. The first step is getting VA-API working, which on Ubuntu was pretty easy. A simple sudo apt install vainfo pulled in all the required video drivers. Then running vainfo and not getting an error message showed that iHD (the MediaSDK driver for newer Intel graphics) was
PLODDING TOWARDS ACCELER ATION
Back in 2010, some enthusiastic fellow filed a bug at the Mozilla bugtracker asking for HTML5 video acceleration in Firefox. That seemed like a reasonable ask, seeing as it was already implemented for other platforms (well, Windows at least). The bug report was closed in 2019, but you can still read it at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206. Or there’s another one, still open, at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromiumbrowser/+bug/1424201. The first few responses show that this was never going to be an easy thing to implement. And our efforts over these two pages show that even with all the bits now in place (technically they’ve been there since Firefox 78), getting everything working is far from straightforward.