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
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!
@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.