Trying Using GPU to decode video when watching Youtube

High CPU use when watching youtube.

Configuration of PC

• Ubuntu 20.04
• i5-6600K
• 4*8Gb
• GTX 1050 (2G)

When watching a 4K@60fps video. The CPU usage can be around 80% and GPU usage is roughly 15%. At this time, Youtube uses vp9 as the codec.

Solutions

I have found two tutorials online. One is for Chrome as well as others. Another is forChromium. I am following the tutorial from the first one.

I enabled the following in Chrome:

chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist
chrome://flags/#enable-accelerated-video-decode

I have installed the following packages. This step is to install the VA-API to be able to decode media.

sudo apt install i965-va-driver-shaders libva-drm2 libva-x11-2
sudo dpkg -i libvdpau1_1.4-2_ubuntu20.04.1_amd64.deb
sddo dpkg -i vdpau-va-driver_0.7.4-7ubuntu1_ppa2_20.04.1_amd64.deb

The NVIDIA Driver Version is 460.39. Launch the browser using --use-gl=desktop to enable VA-API hardware acceleration.

google-chrome-stable --use-gl=desktop

Problem

After the previous steps. When playing the same video, I still have problems with high CPU usage. And the chrome://media-internals still shows that I am using FFmpegVideoDecoder. It should be MojoVideoDecoder which enables the GPU decoding.

Test using the extension h264ify

The extension h264ify forces the youtube video to be played with h.264 videos. This solution worked, but the problem is that the 4k resolution is no long available. I can only play it with HD.

No h264ify extension and open chrome with --use-gl=desktop

I uninstalled the h264ify extension and run chrome with --use-gl=desktop. Youtube videos cannot be played at all.

Discussion on this topic.

The following links are for archive. I do not have a solution yet. The following links might be useful:

• Nvidia Discussion forum. An answer is:

  Vdpau doesn’t decode VP9, therefore vaapi over vdpau also doesn’t decode VP9. You have never seen hardware-accelerated VP9 playback with chromium-vaapi and your old 1050Ti.

• An experimental Vdpau driver that supports vp9. Link
• Nvidia GPU support list. My GPU is GTX1050 (GP107)
• Chromium beta PPA.