Hw acceleration

Hi,
Do Firefox ,player Celluloid or VLC support HW acceleration ? If not, are there some others apks cooperating with full VC4/V3D KMS graphics driver in Ubuntu MATE 22.04 ?

Regards
Petr

Hi Petr, welcome to the community.

MPV is the most efficient and fastest mediaplayer with full HW acceleration.
it also can do tricks no other player can do.

Celluloid is only a graphical interface wrapper around MPV
so whatever counts for MPV also counts for Celluloid.

VLC also supports HW acceleration but not without caveats:
Not all HW decoding your GPU is capable of is fully supported by VLC.
After HW decoding the frames are being copied back to the CPU for postprocessing (which slows it down tremendously) which can't be bypassed.

HW decoding on VLC does not offer a big reduction on resource consumption, neither does it increase the processing speed of decoding much.

HW decoding is completely dependent on the hardware of your GPU.
No driver can change anything about that.
for example: If your chipset does not support H265, it won't do acceleration on H265 streams.

By the way, would you be so kind to explain what you mean by:

apks ?
VC4 ?
V3D ?

I am reasonably versed in abbreviations and jargon, especially on audio and video, but I haven't encountered these three before.

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@tkn He's talking about the Pi. VC4 is the Pi3's pseudo-GPU; and VC6, also called V3D, is the Pi4's.

@Petr_Vodicka In a nutshell, no; but also, yes, provided you can live with some fairly high restrictions.

The only hw decode supported on the Pi via any means other than the Raspbian kernel and the massively-hacked custom VLC build in Raspbian is h264. It's further limited to only 8-bit formats, and also only 4:2:x chroma. (It also has bandwidth limits, but you're a lot less likely to run into those).
The benefit of hw decode for that small subset of video formats is, roughly, about 5% at best (1080p), because of all the repeated copying and reformatting of the frames after they come out of the decoder.

The other option is to abandon having a working desktop and use kodi instead. This supposedly works very well, and has support for the h265 decoder as well, but I haven't tried it myself.

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