Dear List,

Recently I learned about the efforts to upgrade VA-API to 1.0 for Fedora 28 [1] and I immediately recalled a patch [2] from Intel in the Chromium Gerrit that hasn't landed yet. This patch would enable an experimental HWA video decode flag in Chromium on Linux. There's also the Intel Hybrid Driver which enables VP8 and VP9 HW decode for certain Intel chipset families [3].

The vast majority of users watch videos using a web browser. AFAIK the Firefox browser will never support HWA video decode on Linux. I'm not sure if there are efforts at Mozilla to make this possible. However it seems like in Chromium this is a WIP issue although it's taking a very long time for it be merged.

Would it be possible for Fedora to help move things forward here and carry these patches in Chromium to enable both HWA and VP8/VP9 HW decode support for users? Would this be able to land by Fedora 28 or be carried as a post-release update?

It would also be worth investigating the situation with Firefox and seeing if there's a possibility that Mozilla may consider HWA video decode now that the graphics drivers are in good shape on Linux now?

Unfortunately I'm not a C/C++ developer so I wouldn't know what's involved in moving this forward.

Thank you!

Best, Alex G.S.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/VA-API_1.0.0 [2] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/532294 [3] https://github.com/01org/intel-hybrid-driver