![]() ![]() Tests 1-7 and 11-12 used KDE Neon Linux, kernel 5.0.0-34, with TLP enabled and using default settings. The video is the same (1080p, 24fps, h.264) in both cases, with the only difference being that one is encrypted (using the same Widevine method as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other content providers) and one is not.įor all tests, Wifi was on, bluetooth off, sound muted, display brightness about 20%, no USB devices plugged in. I also tested Waterfox in Windows 10 (which has HAVD) and in SMplayer in Linux and Windows, which both have HAVD as well. I tested using unencrypted video from Youtube and Widevine encrypted video from, on Waterfox Classic 2019.10 and Chromium 79 (development version, patched, from the saiarcot895 PPA). In the olden days of laptops, the remaining battery percentage was estimated, but batteries in modern laptops report their rate of charge or discharge and remaining charge to the system, so the OS does not need to estimate. ![]() I would charge the Swift to 100%, then start the video playing (in this case, Big Buck Bunny at 1080p, 24 fps, h.264, looped), and measure the time it takes to get to 90% battery life remaining. I devised a series of tests to get an idea. One of the main complaints of people who want hardware acceleration in our browsers is just that… but with the iffy hardware acceleration of Chromium, what will the difference be? My main concern on the Swift is battery life. That kind of hardware acceleration uses the GPU to draw the onscreen elements, and is used all the time, not just while decoding video streams. Note that HAVD is not the same as the option that browsers typically just call hardware acceleration, which Waterfox and unpatched Chromium do have. I get the same result in Waterfox, which of course has no option to use hardware decoding. It can just about handle it if there is nothing else at all running on it, but even something like moving the mouse will cause it to stutter and drop a lot of frames. Without hardware decoding acceleration in Chromium, the 60 fps video is rough on the Swift. ![]() Dedicated media players like VLC or SMPlayer (which have full hardware video decode acceleration) are able to stream the same video with considerably less CPU usage. It paused (a single stutter) for a fraction of a second every five seconds or so, while the older Chromium builds I tested a while back (not sure which ones they were) just streamed the video flawlessly with about 40% CPU usage. Recently, Chromium has switched to the “Mojo” decoder in the code base, presumably because it is better than the old one in some way, but when I tried to use it to stream a 1080p 60 fps video on my slow Swift, it didn’t work as well as it used to. It seemed kind of like it was half accelerated compared to the full HAVD acceleration found in Windows browsers and dedicated media players on any platform. I’ve tested it before and found it quite effective, though it did not reduce the CPU use as much as using hardware-accelerated media players like VLC. Still, Chromium is open source, and the patched versions are available in the repos of several distros, and by PPA for Ubuntu and derivatives. The patch to enable hardware-accelerated video decoding (I will call it HAVD for short) was submitted a long time ago, but Google refuses to accept the submission. They say it’s unreliable and does not work with all setups (nVidia in particular), which is probably true, but even if the patch is installed, the feature is still disabled by default and hidden behind a “flag” that marks it as an experimental and unsupported feature, so why not just enable it and let the user decide as with other experimental, unsupported features? The code to enable the feature is already in the browser, as I understand, as a remnant of the code to enable the feature in the Linux-based ChromeOS, but Google has it blocked on all non-ChromeOS Linux distros for reasons that don’t seem valid to me. At this time, the only browser for Linux that offers hardware-accelerated video decoding is the patched version of Chromium. ![]()
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