Latest Firefox for Linux doesn't support HW acceleration with old Intel GMA 3000 GPU
Hi!,
After spending days trying various online guides in technical blogs, forums e.t.c. to enable HW acceleration in Firefox to offload video decoding to the GPU, I decided as my last resort to post here.
I installed Linux Lite to an old laptop with intel GMA 3000 using the latest Intel drivers from Mesa in order to give it a new life using Linux and getting better performance. My initial intention was to use firefox (as I do in my desktop windows PC) but I wanted to get better performance and battery life by using GPU for video decoding. Intel GMA 3000 supports AVC1 (H264) decoding and it's very efficient. I have to say that Chrome fully supports this GPU and Video decoding in it's latest version (I have confirmed it using Intel_gpu_top utility).
Can someone here tell me if the aforementioned GPU can work together with Firefox Hardware acceleration implementation in order to support accelerated video decoding ?
If you need any information of my system please let me know.
Thanks in advance for your time.
All Replies (3)
Dropa said
You indicated Windows 11 O/S usage and now talking Linux-so which is this asking for? For older hardware GPU support you need to contact the site your using for the GPU software for support - Firefox forum isn't here to diagnosis with why a intel driver won't work with Linux or Win system. That is up to the site providing the Video driver to diagnosis their driver issue.
Please read again my post.
The problem isn't with my windows PC neither with GPU drivers. As I said, on the same laptop running Linux, with the same drivers, Chrome can use GPU to accelerate video decoding whilst Firefox can't. To my knowledge Firefox should support GPU video decoding by changing some flags in the about:config page but this doesn't seem to work. That's why I posted here.
You can check the graphics section on the "Help -> More Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to see if there are GPU errors reported.
Hi
thanks for your reply.
Please see some info from my system configuration. What I have done so far is to make sure that intel drivers work for the X11 (I can see that 3D acceleration is working by using the Intel_gpu_top utility) and I installed Chrome which also uses the VAAPI of Intel/Mesa drivers to accelerate video (it's not by default enabled in chrome, I had to change some flags but it works just fine). Again, using intel_gpu_top I can confirm that Video acceleration works for AVC1/H264 videos. I tested VLC as well and indeed, video acceleration works just fine with my Intel HD GMA 3000 GPU.
Now with Firefox I couldn't do the same. I have set media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to True and installed all the necessary codecs and tools related to ffmepg. Also I tried to force enable HW acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all to True but after starting firefox it becomes almost unresponsive to any of my inputs.
Trying to find a solution I came across this link where it is stated that there are prerequisites in order for firefox to support video acceleration even if the gpu driver supports it. Could you please check the screenshots attached and let me know if my driver meets the requirements for firefox or not ?
Thanks in advance for your support!
Modified by kallianiotis.nikolas