It works fine right now but who knows what may happen after some update. So you might find bugs, it may crash, etc. It should be clear to everyone reading this that Chromium Beta or Dev Branch is not considered stable.

Installing and using Chromium browser with VA-API support on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

The patches used by the Chromium Ubuntu builds with VA-API enabled used in this article are available here.Īs an added benefit, by using Chromium with VA-API installed from PPA you get to have native Chromium builds (actual DEB packages) on Ubuntu, instead of the new default Snap Chromium builds, which Ubuntu has started pushing by default. See this for more information: How To Enable Hardware Accelerated Video Decode In Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi And Opera Browsers On Debian, Ubuntu Or Linux Mint Google Chrome and other Chromium-based web browsers now have VA-API support by default. There's also a section below for how to check if you're actually using hardware accelerated video decoding. Open a HD video on YouTube and check the CPU usage in a tool such as htop (this is what I'm using in the screenshots above to check the CPU usage) - you should see high CPU usage because GPU video decoding is not actually enabled. After enabling this option, you may find the following when visiting chrome://gpu: ' Video Decode: Hardware accelerated', but this does not mean it actually works. The patch to add VA-API support to Chromium on Linux, titled ' Enable VAVDA, VAVEA and VAJDA on linux with VAAPI only' was was initially submitted to Chromium more than a year ago, but it has yet to be merged.Ĭhrome has an option to override the software rendering list ( #ignore-gpu-blacklist), but this option does not enable hardware accelerated video decoding. On my laptop, the Chromium CPU usage without hardware acceleration goes way higher. Both screenshots were taken on my old, but still quite powerful desktop. This is Chromium from the Ubuntu (18.04) repositories without GPU accelerated video decoding playing a 1080p YouTube video: The instructions cover only Intel and Nvidia graphics cards, as I don't have an ATI/AMD graphics card to try this, nor do I have experience with such graphics cards, but from what I've read, this should work with ATI/AMD graphics too. This article explains how to install a Chromium beta or development build which includes a patch that enables VA-API on Linux, bringing support for GPU accelerated video decoding, which should significantly decrease the CPU usage when watching HD videos online. That's because Chrome / Chromium (Firefox too but there's no way to force this) doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux. You may have noticed that watching HD videos from Youtube and other similar websites in Google Chrome or Chromium browsers on Linux considerably increases your CPU usage and, if you use a laptop, it gets quite hot and the battery drains very quickly.

Ubuntu nvidia ppa