So today Akademy 2020 started. This year it is an online event, meaning that stuff happens on your browser with BigBlueButton.

This gave me the motivation to fix hardware acceleration with Chromium on my system. You need a browser able to do hardware-accelereted video decoding if you don’t want to hear the noise of a CPU fan alongside the voice of our fellow KDE people, or if you just don’t want to waste power. Unfortunately hardware-accelereted video decoding on Linux browsers is still a mess in 2020, to the best of my knowledge.

What I had to do to enable hardware-acceleration in Chromium on my ThinkPad T450s was:

  1. Switch back to Plasma on X11 :(
  2. Create ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf with the following flags:
--ignore-gpu-blacklist
--enable-gpu-rasterization
--enable-zero-copy
--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds
--use-gl=desktop

You also need to make sure that your Chromium package has been compiled with VA-API support. And of course you need to have VA-API enabled on your system.

I haven’t tried with Firefox, but it should be possible to enable hardware-acceleration there as well (supposedly also on Wayland).