Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding 8
Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux's long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports: Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn't universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver to layer VA-API atop NVIDIA NVDEC interfaces to enjoy GPU-accelerated video playback in Firefox. Smaller Arm/embedded graphics drivers also have been largely left out of the game in the VA-API space. But with Vulkan Video we are beginning to see more adoption and in a cross-platform manner.
[...] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat's Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.
[...] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat's Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.
It's actually cross-platform and cross-API compat (Score:5, Informative)
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not cross-API compatible because it is an API. It's implemented on multiple platforms and it's only supported on platforms it's implemented for.
Also, you seem to be forgetting there are a lot of API specific functions functions: e.g. vkCreateWaylandSurfaceKHR, vkCreateWin32SurfaceKHR, vkCreateXcbSurfaceKHR, vkCreateXlibSurfaceKHR.
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not cross-API compatible because it is an API.
While that's technically true, what I'm asserting is that it's being used by other API's (various game and GL libraries) across platforms in a way that actually works.
you seem to be forgetting there are a lot of API specific functions functions
There are only a handful of ways to implement something like Vulkan across so many different display strategies. Frankly, I think they've adopted the most sane and straightforward solution: do first class support for all of them as best you can and abstract those behind your API. If Khronos were selling Wayland or X11, they'd be stuck in the same divide as all the 'next gen' solutions that are busy failing or building a walled garden.
THIS is what we want from Mozilla/Firefox!! (Score:2)
This, the PDF handling and the screenshot features is what I want to see from Firefox.
Re: (Score:2)
>"This, the PDF handling and the screenshot features is what I want to see from Firefox."
Well, we have had the PDF handling and screenshot features in Firefox for a long time. And I do like them both.
Having Vulkan support is very welcome. Although I admit I dumped NVidia a long time ago. All my machines are either AMD GPU or Intel, and both work fine with VA-API. I think only mostly NVidia being an issue with using VA-API (and maybe some ARM systems).
Re: (Score:3)
The screenshoting feature is annoying. It doesn't capture what you exactly see on the page. Judging by it's output, it looks like it pages up/down over and over again then stitches all that together. The issue with that is as an increasing number of websites have floating headers/footers, those elements end up on every page in the screen shot blocking what you wanted to capture. Same when you try to print the page too. I hate having to be a webdev in order to capture a page.
You also can't screenshot th