Request for Hardware-accelerated video decode (vaapi) on Linux!

Brave Feature Requests Desktop Requests
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Dear “Brave” developers, good afternoon!

I would ask you to add Hardware-accelerated video decode (vaapi) on Brave browser on Linux!

For some reason Google has removed that option form Chromium project on Linux by default, but there is a chromium project that patched vaapi! https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/

It’s very important for many of Linux users to have that option because without vaapi, when you watch a video with vp09 codec (Every video on YouTube nowadays) at 60fps or 4K, the system’s CPU, can load up to 90%!

On the other hand, with vaapi enabled CPU can decode a video in company with the GPU and as final result, the CPU’s load is about 25%!

In conclusion, you could use the available patch (https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/chromium-vaapi.patch?h=chromium-vaapi) to bring back this very important feature!

Many thanks,
Mark A

1 Like
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Yes. Brave community please take a look into this. I installed brave yesterday on kubuntu and there was an option to enable hardware-accelerated-video-decode but today brave received an update and that option is gone and I am back to software decode which is using too much of my CPU. Please take this as a priority issue!

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Surprising to me that this is still not supported. I spend most of my time on activities that benefit from hardware acceleration, and by my observation, Brave typically sits at at least double the CPU usage of Firefox. This is the only reason I use Firefox as my primary browser.

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This is a good resource: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration

On Fedora 40, I found that the flag --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL works for me.