Chromium hardware-accelerated build for Intel-based platforms available for beta testing

Desktop
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#1

Canonical and Intel have partnered to build a version of the Chromium browser that enables hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding. This should result in improved performance and extend the battery life for Kaby Lake (7th Gen) and newer platforms, when using VP8, VP9, and H.264 codecs [1].

To try this version, you will need to switch Chromium to the hwacc branch.

To install hardware accelerated Chromium:
snap install chromium --channel=latest/candidate/hwacc

To switch from a previous installation:
snap refresh chromium --channel=latest/candidate/hwacc

To go back to the stable channel:
snap refresh chromium --channel=latest/stable

Alternatively, you can have both versions installed and running in parallel.

Let us know if you notice the improvements, how you are testing, and if you find any problems.

For reporting any specific issues, you can also use the bug tracker.
Thank you!

[1] https://github.com/intel/media-driver#decodingencoding-features

11 Likes
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 787
Problems with Intel Iris Xe GPU hardware video acceleration in 22.04
#3

Great work! Can confirm I have much lower resource usage while playing youtube video on 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1280P, Ubuntu 22.04, X.org.

chrome://gpu/ is also a lot happier with this branch.

3 Likes
#4

By the way intel_gpu_top or about://media-internals can be used to verify if hardware acceleration is really being used.

More information in LP: #1816497.

1 Like
#5

Doesn’t this also work for AV1? That seems to be in the linked table and it seems to be working for me on my Alder Lake for a YouTube video that “Stats for Nerds” says is av01.

#6

AV1 should also work on 11th generation Intel CPUs and later. Sometimes you just have to omit details from announcements to avoid being overly wordy or confusing people.

That said, I should also note that if “Stats for Nerds says is av01” that tells you what the software is doing, not whether the hardware is being used for it. To verify hardware acceleration, run sudo intel_gpu_top to see that the Video cores of your GPU are active.

1 Like
#7

Are there any plans to support Video Encode (for WebRTC video chat) where supported by the VAAPI Media Driver? For example for VP9?

#8

Should this work on both X11 and Wayland… ?

#9

Yes both should work. If anything doesn’t work for you then please open a bug.

#10

Hardware-accelerated encode doesn’t seem to work right now. But hardware-accelerated decode in Google Meet for example does work already. I don’t know a timeline for encoding support.

1 Like
#11

We have updated the snap build to 2475.
Along with the chromium version update, a couple of issues were fixed.
Let us know your feedback!

#12

Hello.

Sorry to chime in this late. Is chromium-ffmpeg a necessary snap as well?

Thank you for your time.

#13

That snap is only needed for third-party browser snaps. Everything I’ve seen only references Opera using it.