1957284 - VAAPI not working under Wayland with Intel iGPU (Iris Xe) – Video stuck / no playback (Firefox 124, Manjaro Linux)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

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

Description

[Pascal]

Attachment: logs.tar.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start Firefox (tested both Repo and Flatpak version)
2. Ensure VAAPI is enabled via about:config:
   • media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled = true
   • media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled = true
3. Use Intel iGPU (Iris Xe), confirmed via glxinfo
4. Open any video (e.g. YouTube)

Actual results:

Video does not play – it stays stuck at the first frame. Audio plays fine.
No crash occurs. VAAPI is listed as "available" in about:support but is not used.
MOZ_LOG shows fallback to software decoding.
This happens with both Firefox from the Arch/Manjaro repo and Flatpak.

Expected results:

Video should play smoothly using VAAPI hardware decoding on the Intel GPU.

Comment 1

[Pascal]

Additional note:

This issue is not limited to Firefox – Chromium (both system and Flatpak) shows the same behavior: videos do not play, VAAPI not used, GPU process crashes or falls back to software.

VAAPI itself is working fine on the system:

• mpv --hwdec=vaapi works
• vainfo lists all expected profiles
• Intel GPU (Iris Xe) is active and confirmed via glxinfo

This might indicate a deeper issue in Mesa, libva, or Wayland DRM device access. I am reporting here to document the Firefox-specific side of the problem.

Please let me know if this should be escalated upstream (e.g. Mesa GitLab).

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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.