Best way to get h264 accelerated again?

I guess there are different settings for AV1 in ffmpeg.

A low setting would speed up AV1 encoding when its compression ratio is worse or like HEVC. :thinking:
I will test and compare 3 codecs for my CPU without hardware acceleration tomorrow.

You don’t have AV1 with pre NAVI (RX5000 series) Radeons… And all of our downloaded movies are encoded with x264 or x265.

I know, streaming is a thing and youtube uses AV1, but this situation it still sucks. Especially for people with older Radeons…

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Muy GPU doesnt have either vp9 or av1 so Im alone here. Do you think that all the people can afford new hardware? Srly?

I have a doubt. Do you promote a mini pc with manjaro pre-installed and no have GPU acceleration?
https://www.bee-link.com/beelink-ser5-5600h-manjaro-os-minipc

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You’re not alone here, I don’t have VP9 and AV1 on my laptop Intel HD 530. Useless, I do not notice it has the issue with Youtube VP9 decoding.

The decoding should regularly have a lower effort than the encoding without hardware acceleration. Useless, you can’t watch any video stream with 10x speed decoding.

Edit:
Netflix or YouTube forces you to decode VP9 at 1080p or higher resolution when you want to watch videos. You can not change or force YouTube or Netflix to use H265.


A counter question:

Do you think all people use Adobe Flash Player and H.263 and can afford their used old GPUs for 30 years and daily use without damage?

That depends on time and change by many big companies e.g. Apple and Google … etc.
That is about the evolution of media streaming and GPU.

  • Adobe Flash Player was killed by many big companies to change the world.

  • Each GPU has a lifespan limit for daily use. People would buy a new GPU that gets a AV1 codec when their old GPU is broken.

Time will tell what will change media streaming in the future by companies’s decision (Alliance for Open Media) and hardware manufacturers.

That is off-topic

Cool, i will wait!
No, I will not!
I’ll watch the nonsense here for a while, and if they don’t come to their senses, I’ll change distro.
Fedora, Suse, Debian do it more skillfully, Arch also gives a sh… on it, but I try to avoid the daily Archlinux madness, because there is also a life away from pc and notebook.
We can debate forth and back, this move made manjaro unusable for the average user with amd hardware.

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I think so too, I’m already looking for Manjaro’s successor.

If they had at least kept mesa with codecs in a manually installable form, I would stay.

you forget about energy use on laptop. it’s not the same decoding something on GPU that is the job done efficiently than toding in the cpu…

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exactly, without any type of fix I see here

I dont think you have an idea what the “average” user is. Is it a power user, or 66 year old grandma? The truth is someplace in between. I have a amd 570 8gb GPU. Honestly I havent noticed any difference since h264 was disabled. I play a few games, do a lot of surfing and video watching just like I did before.
Getting back to the “average” user. If a great many people (average users) noticed a difference there would be hundreds if not thousands of users posting. Instead we have a handful of niche users who cant seem to understand how to get the functionality they want back after getting multiple options to do so. That doesnt sound like a Manjaro problem, but a pebkac one.

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Shure, of course you can become personal in defense, but I don’t care what you think. This is not about personal, this is about general.

I’ve created a script that replaces the mesa packages with the ones from arch:

#!/bin/bash
#Problems: Couldn't figure out a way to download package with wget with correct version name.

libdomain="https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/"
multilibdomain="https://archlinux.org/packages/multilib/x86_64/"
packagelist="lib32-libva-mesa-driver
lib32-mesa
lib32-mesa-vdpau
libva-mesa-driver
mesa
mesa-utils
mesa-vdpau
lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
lib32-vulkan-radeon
vulkan-headers
vulkan-icd-loader
vulkan-radeon
vulkan-tools"
#Excluded Packages:
#   lib32-mesa-demos
#   mesa-demos
#   lib32-vulkan-intel
#   vulkan-intel
#   lib32-opencl-mesa
#   opencl-mesa


echo "Warning: This script installs unsupported packages from another linux distribution (Arch Linux) there are many things that could go wrong!
Are you sure you want to continue? [Y/n]"

read REPLY
if [ "$REPLY" = "Y" ] || [ "$REPLY" = "y" ]; then
    echo
else
    echo "Would you instead like to reinstall manjaro's original mesa pacakges? [Y/n]"
    read REPLY
    if [ "$REPLY" = "Y" ] || [ "$REPLY" = "y" ]; then
        sudo pacman -S --noconfirm $packagelist
    fi
    exit
fi

mkdir /home/$USER/.cache/mesa_update
cd /home/$USER/.cache/mesa_update

for package in $packagelist;do
    if echo $package | grep lib32; then
        wget --show-progress -qO $package.pkg.tar.zst "$multilibdomain$package/download"
    else
        wget --show-progress -qO $package.pkg.tar.zst "$libdomain$package/download"
    fi
    sudo pacman -U --noconfirm $package.pkg.tar.zst
done

cd -
rm -rf /home/$USER/.cache/mesa_update

I don’t know if it’s the ‘best’ way, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong by installing packages meant for another distro that could be of a different version than the ones manjaro is meant to be using, and you’d have to re-run the script everytime there’s a system update and manjaro overwrites the packages.

But it seems like currently it works completely.

Best way is definitely not how I would describe it, but a way for sure.

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Over the past few days I were trying almost all the solutions ( besides changing distro) in order to keep my system fully functional.
Or at least how it was some weeks ago…

Nonetheless : I just want to add that in order to put it work I had to switch to the Unstable branch and followed the mesa-git path …

Both Stable and Testing branch did compile mesa-git but the functionality were not functional …
So for the record perhaps would be better to indicate that one of the “possible solutions” would be to change to the Unstable branch and then recompile mesa-git …
Just my personal opinion though …

Oi!, I’m a 71 year old Grandma.

But seriously, I don’t see what the problem is. As far as I (we, my partner, and I) are concerned, nothing has changed. She still watches YouTube, I still process Movies, what ever their encoding, that includes h264, to a smaller format for storage on our file server.

Yep.

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Fantastic! The reason I mentioned a 66 year old grandma is that describes my wife, she is far from a power user. She uses Manjaro (I live in a linux only house) and still does everything she did before h264 was disabled.

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Me too. The last time I used Windows was Windows 7 running on a VM on Linux, so I could code in C#.

I hope this post is just a joke. Solutions like mixing Arch’s mesa with Manjaro is not really a good idea.

Right now, your CPU decode x264/265 movies as did it before GPU acceleration was a thing in Linux… But it is wasting power by doing so.
I have a good CPU with many cores and a big silent cooler, so it is not an issue for me, not even with big 4k HDR files. But if you are trying to do the same on a laptop, it may go brrrrrrrrr like a hair dryer.

It was not a joke. You mention one way and dont mention the others in this thread. Solutions exist, even if you dont like them. If those dont work for you, you could always build mesa from scratch with flags to enable h264. This is Linux and you are not limited to what others provide. You have the freedom to change and compile code. If you dont know how, learn.

My last Windows was XP. I was into 3D modeling at the time so I bought a computer with one of the first 64bit processors, an AMD Athlon 3500. I thought it would speed up rendering time. I got it home only to find out it had 32bit XP, hobbling the hardware I paid a premium for. I went searching for 64bit Os’s and found linux (Ubuntu Breezy Badger). I never went back.
A friend gave my wife a Dell 24 inch all in one because they got a new computer. They told me Windows was messed up after years of use. Likely from using Internet Exploder. I put Manjaro on it and she loves it. It works flawlessly, even the touch screen.

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Ehh… Let’s face it, regularly compiling mesa from source is anything but convenient. Yes, I can do it, but I won’t, because it’s pure nonsense.

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Let’s sum up Best way to get h264 accelerated again?

First and foremost - stop whining - it is a counter productive waste of energy.

Get used to it

  • Follow advise from @Zesko [1]
  • Build from a modded PKGBUILD [2]
  • When a skilled grandma has no issues with current mesa [3] - you shouldn’t either.

The topic is exhausted - closed - with this topic as the conclusion.

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