1880346 - about:support states all Hardware Decoding unsupported, video playback on all websites extremely poor

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[kel.bolden]

Attachment: Screenshot_20240215_051707_Firefox.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 13; Mobile; rv:122.0) Gecko/122.0 Firefox/122.0

Steps to reproduce:

On Samsung S20 5G, opened about:support, note status under Hardware Decoding Support.

Attempt playback of video in browser, e.g. YouTube.com, note playback performance. Observe general web rendering performance and system impact.

Actual results:

Hardware decoding listed as Unsupported for all codecs.

Video playback extremely poor, 240p 4fps.

General browsing performance also noted as poor, scrolling not smooth, battery usage abnormally high while using browser.

Expected results:

Hardware decoding should be supported per all other installed browsers. Video playback performance should be smooth at all supported resolutions per all other installed browsers. General web rendering performance should not be noticeably worse and battery usage should not be noticeably higher than all other installed browsers.

Behaviour identical between Stable and Nightly builds.

Comment 1

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:amejia, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 2

[kel.bolden]

I captured more observations about the issue in this Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1aqsx8t/samsung_s20_5g_all_hardware_acceleration/

Some key details are that the issue is much worse in the default portrait, video shown in frame compared to full screen, which is nearly acceptable.

Comment 3

[akac]

Me to has this on firefox nightly

Comment 4

[akac]

Xiaomi redmi note 10 pro latest updates installed

Comment 5

[Kaya [:kaya]]

Forwarding this ticket to the Graphics component. Please see this comment made on the [possible dup] of this ticket.

Comment 6

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:bhood, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 7

[Jamie Nicol [:jnicol]]

Thanks for the bug report! about:support misreporting hardware acceleration being unavailable is bug 1870628, which should now be fixed. If you could retest on Nightly it should now say hardware acceleration is supported.

Could you please attach your full about:support information to this page? If you could also provide a link to a specific video which performs poorly that would be great. And additionally if you could capture a performance profile while playing the video that would really help us track down the issue. Thanks!

Comment 8

[John Lin [:jhlin][:jolin]]

It looks like bug 1870628 didn't completely fix the about:support issue. Traditionally, we use codec name matching to query hardware acceleration capabilities, but this method no longer works reliably on recent Android versions. Since API 29, Android has added a public API for this, and we should use it. I'll upload the fix for about support later.

It could be a different story regarding the frame-dropping issue (bug 1872354 or bug 1877948?).

Comment 9

[John Lin [:jhlin][:jolin]]

Attachment: Bug 1880346 - use new API to query if codec is HW accelerated.

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/101b67d76547
use new API to query if codec is HW accelerated. r=geckoview-reviewers,media-playback-reviewers,padenot,owlish

Comment 11

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/101b67d76547