Enabling hardware acceleration in chrome based browsers on Linux (wayland)
Quick guide on how to enable hardware video decoding in Chrome:
Tested on Chrome version: 117.0.5938.149 OS: Tuxedo Linux (Based on Ubuntu 22.04) GPU: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics (0x9A49)
Check GPU support: #
Verify whether the GPU supports decoding the required codecs (VP9, AV1, AVC for YouTube)
Intel - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/encode-and-decode-capabilities-for-7th-generation-intel-core-processors-and-newer.html
Nvidia - https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new#geforcedec
AMD - Todo
Install the drivers #
Install the latest GPU drivers - Todo
Packages needed for hardware acceleration - libva, codecs(eg. ubuntu-restricted-extras)
Todo - List all necessary packages
Enable hardware acceleration #
Launch chrome using the following flag google-chrome-stable --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL this should enable hardware acceleration.
Verify if it's actually working #
Play any video bring up the developer tools using ctrl+shift+i, in the hamburger menu select media , under players tab select the one with current video. The Video Decoder section under properties should say Hardware decoder - True
Other flags to mess around #
--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,PlatformHEVCDecoderSupport,Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE,UseOzonePlatform --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --disable-gpu-driver-workarounds --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-zero-copy --ozone-platform=wayland