Back in February 2019, a user submitted a report on the Ubuntu bug page that the Snap version of Chromium lacked support for VA-API (Video Acceleration API) video hardware decoding (as shown below), after which Snap Chromium has been in Status of missing VA-API hardware decoding support. Now, after nearly three and a half years, the Ubuntu development team has finally figured out how to solve this problem.
VA-API is an open-source application programming interface that allows applications to obtain hardware video acceleration through GPUs. It is implemented by the free open-source library libva, usually provided with GPU drivers. The VA-API video decoding/encoding interface is platform- and window-system-independent, and can accelerate processing including support for video decoding, video encoding, and rendering.
The VA-API specification was originally designed by Intel for its GMA series of GPU hardware with the specific purpose of eventually replacing the XvMC standard, but today the API is no longer limited to Intel-specific hardware or GPUs, other hardware and manufacturers are free to use This open standard API, uses their own hardware for hardware-accelerated video processing without paying royalties.
Turning video processing to GPU can effectively improve processing efficiency and reduce energy consumption, especially to improve the battery life of notebook computers.
Nathan Teodosio and Sebastien Bacher are two Ubuntu developers who have been submitting frequent new builds in the last few days, working on fixing VA-API support issues for the Snap version of Chromiun. While this bug report is nearly three and a half years old, it looks like it will be closed soon.
Judging from the comments and build status on the report page, the build is not stable at this stage, and there are still a lot of problems to be solved (so it has not been put into the Ubuntu app store), but it is already a big problem to have started to deal with it. made progress. Users interested in trying out Chromium Snaps that support hardware acceleration can view the installation instructions below.
In January of this year, Firefox has already received full VA-API support on the Linux platform, and Chromium should step up.
Installation method:
-
If you are running Chromium in Snap mode, please back up your bookmarks, passwords, etc. first.
-
Press Ctrl + Alt + T keys on the keyboard, open a terminal, run the following command to remove the Chromium snap by command
sudo snap remove chromium
3. Next, install the beta version that supports hardware acceleration by running the command.
sudo snap install --channel candidate/hwacc chromium
