1809068 - Hardware video decoding was accidentally removed for Linux

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect)

Description

[mikey]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:108.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/108.0

Steps to reproduce:

Hardware video decoding appears to have been accidentally removed for Linux apart from in the early beta or earlier.

This appears to have happened when attempting to change the feature flag to match other OSs. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1773282

This change is already being patched by some distros, but should be fixed in Firefox. https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/firefox/blob/main/f/firefox-enable-vaapi.patch

Actual results:

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING
available by default
blocklisted by env: Blocklisted by gfxInfo

Expected results:

Hardware video decoding should be available for linux like every other OS.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

:stransky, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1773282, could you take a look?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 3

[Darkspirit]

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING wasn't available on Linux before. The media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled pref was just enabled without any code for Linux behind it.
Since bug 1773282, the HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING feature is able to utilize the code that was added behind the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled pref.
For example, media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled=true is now an alias for media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true.

Fedora enables experimental features in their Firefox build.

Comment 4

[mikey]

Yes. You renamed "nsIGfxInfo::FEATURE_VAAPI" to "nsIGfxInfo::FEATURE_HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING" and then blocked it for all devices on Linux without the build flag "EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER".

VA-API support was added in Firefox 80. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619523

Are you saying that it was removed and it is no longer supported?

Comment 5

[Darkspirit]

Linux: media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled is true by default, but blocked for everything than EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER.

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING
available by default
blocklisted by env: Blocklisted by gfxInfo

But you can still force-enable VAAPI hardware video decoding by setting media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled=true on about:config (which has the same effect as setting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true).

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING
available by default
force_enabled by user: Force enabled by pref
blocklisted by env: Blocklisted by gfxInfo

Comment 6

[mikey]

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

Comment 7

[Darkspirit]

bug 1777430 is about enabling VAAPI hardware video decoding by default (removing the blocklist rule).
bug 1610199 tracks remaining bugs.