Can anyone explain to me how I can get hardware acceleration to work in Firefox running on Debian? I have tried both default the packaged ESR and the the latest Firefox release directly form Mozilla.
All I ever get is “blocked by platform” in about:support and I have tried everything suggested in the Debian and Arch wiki. 🤷
https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Hardware_Video_Acceleration
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration
Running Debian 12 / Bookworm, Xfce, using Intel HD Graphics 530 (I’m using an Intel Core i7-6820HQ).
Edit: Looks like I found the cause for my problems: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/474822
@CryptGoat Did you try the flatpak version?
Thanks or the suggestion. The Flatpak is indeed doing just fine but it’s not an option for a number of reasons, such as the Flatpak version not working with certain addons (KeePassXC-Browser cannot connect to KeePassXC).
@CryptGoat I see. Hopefully this will get ironed out soon.
And never mind, it is also not working in the Flatpak version. Just checked again…
I have working hardware acceleration with the ESR version and media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config, works out of the box.
Did you verify that you get hardware acceleration with a tool like MVP outside of the browser? You can use vainfo and intel-gpu-tools to verify supported codecs and hardware utilization. The intel-media-va-driver-non-free drivers might also work.
Finally, youtube is a good site to test hardware acceleration, Netflix doesn’t support hardware acceleration in Linux.
VLC and mpv are working just fine with hardware acceleration, confirmed it with
intel_gpu_top
.Still nothing on Firefox. Launched it with
MOZ_X11_EGL=1
,media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled
is set totrue
. Tested with YouTube, still nothing. 😑Sorry, I am out of ideas. I am running Firefox via Gnome on Wayland. The only thing I changed was the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag within Firefox-ESR, everything else should be default (plus Firefox plugins which should not be relevant). Perhaps you could try to run Firefox-ESR with a new/default profile were you only change the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag? Or a Debian live-cd with Gnome/Wayland?
Well, looks like I have found the cause: the
TearFree
set totrue
appears to block HW compositing / acceleration in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/intel_graphics#Tearing I have now removed the config file and hardware accelerated video decoding now works just fine while running both Xfce and KDE Plasma.Thanks for all the input!
Switch to Windows.
Enjoy your botnet