Hardware video acceleration in Chromium on Manjaro

[siemsenit]

Earlier today, when i was bored, I turned on "Hardware-accelerated video decode" and "GPU rasterization" in Chromium browser ( chrome://flags ). To my surprise, it actually worked well, bringing CPU load to 80% when playing plain H.264, compared to 160% before.

I am currently Manjaro 21.05 with GNOME 40 on my Pinebook Pro.

I wonder if it works "just for me", so you guys might give it a try.

[wox8606]

The relative change in performance seems quite good, on the other hand 80% of a single core to play a video does not really sound like fully working acceleration.

Did you check which of these two options caused the improvement? What test or website did you use?

[maxjrh]

Is it really hardware accelerated?

Open the devtools with F12 and open the `media` tab. (it's in the hamburger menu under "More Tools" if you've never opened it before)
It will tell you if it's hardware accel'd. For me it shows FFmpegVideoDecoder, which is software. I think MojoVideoDecoder would be hardware.

[siemsenit]

Is it really hardware accelerated?

I'm a little embarrassed, but you are right. I am seeing "FFmpegVideoDecoder" as well. Turning HW acceleration off and on running with different test videos and formats actually show no effect in CPU usage.
What I observed with my first test was a mere coincidence and I got all exited over it and posted prematurely ;-)
And also Chromium would happily lie about HW Video acceleration in chrome://gpu

"Boosted" my PBP with a load of Placebo.