i have a fairly old laptop from a friend here on my desk, a dual core athlon with an a radeon 4000 series gpu.
i already shoved mint 19 on it, finally hoping for some good amdgpu h264 video decoding for youtube but it’s not working on chrome and i read it’s been completely disabled.
i lost myself in countless threads saying to do this and that but other than confusing me even more i’ve decided to come here looking for help: is there any way to get browser gpu video decoding on linux on a such old gpu, keeping in mind that i don’t want it to break every 4 months? switching to a different browser isn’t a problem.
Ignore the x-server comment, i just quickly ran that command over ssh.
Now the first thing that has to be said is that, linux & chromium/ chrome on linux is not particularly straight forward with hardware accelerated video decoding.
If you visit the youtube.com/html5 video page you should see something like this:
mesa va-api packages are already installed and vainfo shows something very similar to your screenshot.
the html5 player page on chrome reports h264 as good, vp8-9 are disabled because of the extension “h264ify”. this is on purpose to force gpu decoding.
while watching 1080 content cpu spikes up to 70-100% constantly (top reports chrome being the utilizer).
when enabling “Override software rendering list”, chrome://gpu reports gpu decoding being enabled but in chrome://media-internals instead i still see “FFmpegVideoDecoder” instead of what i normally see “GpuVideoDecoder”.
stats for nerds reports h264 being the codec in use.
radeontop reports something like 30% utilization during playback in all cases.