Firefox on Fedora finally gets VA-API on Wayland.

I used of Toy Story 3 trailer as a test video and saw it a thousand times during the VA-API debugging. I should definitely watch the movie one day.

Yes, it’s finally here. One and half year after Tom Callaway, Engineering Manager @ Red Hat added the patch to Chromium we also get hardware accelerated video playback for Firefox. It’s shame it took too long but I’m still learning.

The VA-API support in Firefox is a bit specific as it works under Wayland only right now. There isn’t any technical reason for that, I just don’t have enough time to implement it for X11 so Bug 1619523 is waiting for brave hackers.

There are a lot of people who greatly contributed to the Firefox Wayland port. Jan Horak (Red Hat) did all the uneasy Wayland patches reviews I threw at him. Jonas Ådahl (Red Hat) helped me with Wayland backend since the first Wayland patch four years ago. Robert Mader faced various Mutter/Gtk compositor bugs, Kenny Levinsen implemented adaptive Wayland vsync handlers, Jan Andre Ikenmeyer has been tirelessly triaged new Wayland bugs and cleaning bugzilla. Sotaro Ikeda (Mozilla) reviewed almost all Wayland patches for graphics subsystem, Jean-Yves Avenard (Mozilla) reviewed VA-API video patches and Jeff Gilbert (Mozilla) faced to my OpenGL Wayland patches.

The contributor list is not exhaustive as I mentioned only the most active ones who comes to mind right now. There are a lot of people who contribute to Firefox/Wayland. You’re the best!

How to enable it in Fedora?

When you run Gnome Wayland session on Fedora you get Firefox with Wayland backend by default. Make sure you have the latest Firefox 77.0 for Fedora 32 / Fedora 31.

You also need working VA-API acceleration and ffmpeg (valib) packages. They are provided by RPM Fusion repository. Enable it and install ffmpeg, libva and libva-utils.

Intel graphics card

There are two drivers for Intel cards, libva-intel-driver (provides i965_drv_video.so) and libva-intel-hybrid-driver (iHD_drv_video.so). Firefox works with libva-intel-driver only, intel-media-driver is broken due to sandboxing issues (Bug 1619585). I strongly recommend to avoid it all cost and don’t disable media sandbox for it.

AMD graphics card

AMD open source drivers decode video with radeonsi_drv_video.so library which is provided by mesa-dri-drivers package and it comes with Fedora by default.

NVIDIA graphics cards

I have no idea how NVIDIA cards are supported because I don’t owny any. Please refer to Fedora VA-API page for details.

Test VA-API state

When you have the driver set it’s time to prove it. Run vainfo on terminal and check which media formats are decoded on the hardware.

There’s vainfo output from my laptop with integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630. Loads i965_drv_video.so driver and decodes H.264/VP8/VP9 video formats. I don’t expect much more from it – seems to be up.

Configure Firefox

It’s time to whip up the lazy fox At about:config set gfx.webrender.enabled and widget.wayland-dmabuf-vaapi.enabled. Restart browser, go to about:support and make sure WebRender is enabled…

…and Window Protocol is Wayland/drm.

Right now you should be able to decode and play clips on your graphics cards only without any CPU interaction.

Get more info from Firefox log

VA-API video playback may not work from various reason. Incompatible video codec, large video size, missing system libraries and so on. All those errors can be diagnosed by Firefox media log. Run on terminal

MOZ_LOG="PlatformDecoderModule:5" MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

and you should see something like

“VA-API FFmpeg init successful” claims the VA-API is up and running, VP9 is the video format and “Got one VAAPI frame output…” line confirms that frame decoding works.

VA-API and Youtube

Unfortunately Youtube tends to serve various video formats, from H.264 to AV1. Actual codec info is shown after right click on video under “Stats for nerds” option.

Surprisingly “avc1” means H.264 video. You can expect also AV1 and VP8/VP9 there.

Youtube video codec can be changed by enhanced-h264ify Firefox add-on, so disable all SW decoded formats there. And that’s it. If you’re running Fedora you should be settled for now.

We’re done, bro!

VA-API with stock Mozilla binaries

Stock Mozilla Firefox 77.0 is missing some important stability/performance VA-API fixes which hit Firefox 78.0 and are backported to Fedora Firefox package. You should grab latest nightly binaries or Developer/Beta versions and run them under Wayland as

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 ./firefox

Mozilla binaries perform VP8/VP9 decoding by bundled libvpx library which is missing VA-API decode path. If your hardware supports it and you want to use VA-API for VP8/VP9 decoding, you need to disable bundled libvpx and force external ffmpeg. Go to about:config and set media.ffvpx.enabled to false. Fedora sets that by default when VA-API is enabled.