Chromium and VAAPI problem (ubuntu 19.10)

Question

on Ubuntu 19.10 I tried to use chromium from snap store and both ppa (dev, and beta) in order to use it with libva on Intel graphics. I used to use Fedora's chromium package with libva and mostly I never experienced any problem. As of today, I have these issues:

• Snap's provided chromium (vaapi channel) doesn't do GPU acceleration of Video decode even when the required libraries are provided.
• The ppa chromium versions work but with an interesting issue. Only the first tab that I use for video play does the acceleration. After that if I close the tab, it doesn't even open the page which has media on it (or second tab in the browser).

I wonder what is others experience. I looked into the git patches that ppa has and it looks like they are using similar patches that Arch or Fedora packages are using. Is there I am missing?

Answer 1

The snap was vaapi was a short-lived experiment, it seems.

You didn't say what PPA you are using but you may have meant these.

beta: https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-beta

I use the dev ppa.

dev: https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-dev

then play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MpUj-Aua48 in max resolution (2160p)

My user CPU is < 10% (Thinkpad t480) so that's definitely hardware decoded. This integrated graphics has VP9 hardware support, so I don't have extensions forcing H264. If I duplicate the tab so the video is running twice, user CPU is still <10%.

in chrome://media-internals/ find the entry for the current player(s), click on the row and scroll down to see the Player Properties -> Video Decoder Example from my machine:

render_id: 248
player_id: 41
origin_url: https://www.youtube.com/
frame_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MpUj-Aua48
frame_title: YouTube
surface_layer_mode: kAlways
url: blob:https://www.youtube.com/a7e04d98-3dd9-45f0-88b5-c0c32b4c1fcd
info: Selected video track: []
pipeline_state: kPlaying
found_audio_stream: true
audio_codec_name: opus
duration: 1536.001
found_video_stream: true
video_codec_name: vp9
event: PLAY
audio_dds: false
audio_decoder: FFmpegAudioDecoder
is_platform_audio_decoder: false
video_dds: false
video_decoder: MojoVideoDecoder
is_platform_video_decoder: true
audio_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH
height: 2160
width: 3840
video_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH
for_suspended_start: false
pipeline_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH

video_decoder: MojoVideoDecoder is a sign of hardware decoding.

In contrast, under Chrome: (User CPU as high as 40%, fans running)

render_id: 15
player_id: 44
origin_url: https://www.youtube.com/
frame_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MpUj-Aua48
frame_title: 4K Video Relaxing Ultra HD TV Test 2160p 20 minutes - YouTube
surface_layer_mode: kAlways
url: blob:https://www.youtube.com/ebbda754-a09d-4d1f-a497-933d97ff34db
info: Effective playback rate changed from 0 to 1
pipeline_state: kPlaying
found_audio_stream: true
audio_codec_name: opus
found_video_stream: true
video_codec_name: vp9
audio_dds: false
audio_decoder: FFmpegAudioDecoder
is_platform_audio_decoder: false
video_dds: false
video_decoder: VpxVideoDecoder
is_platform_video_decoder: false
event: PLAY
seek_target: 40.91651
audio_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH
height: 2160
width: 3840
video_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH
for_suspended_start: false
pipeline_buffering_state: BUFFERING_HAVE_ENOUGH
duration: 1536.001