I checked mpv media player and twitch video stream on Firefox, they use ffmpeg, H.264 video decoding worked fine with AMD GPU hardware acceleration, CPU total usage is lower than 10% like before, nothing difference.
Video encoding
But I tried to test video encoding benchmark using ffmpeg with VAAPI
It means that the video itself was not high enough bitrate to tax your CPU. You do not have AMD GPU hardware acceleration for H.264. Congrats on having a good CPU though
If someone is interested in just using manjaro’s builds of mesa but with support for patented codecs, they can use this simple script
#!/bin/bash
cd /tmp/
git clone https://gitlab.manjaro.org/packages/extra/mesa.git
cd /tmp/mesa/
sed -i '/-D microsoft-clc=disabled \\/a \ -D video-codecs=vc1dec,h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc \\' PKGBUILD
makepkg -si
cd /tmp/
rm -Rf mesa
I have no idea what the best way to automate it would be. Would be nice if someone could advise me on that front. If this script could be automated with manjaro’s mesa updates, I would not bother switching to arch (compiling does not take much time when all the files are stored in ram).
Also, probably add all the gpg keys in the PKGBUILD before running it.
I didn’t pay for Manjaro so, I have no justification to ask the maintainers to take a (however remote) legal risk just so that I can save 20 minutes or so - a month - compiling a single package.
However, if I was inclined to compile my own packages… I’d run Gentoo.
Why would you only opt to install mesa from the entire stack from arch repos? Either go all in or none. Otherwise you will soon have incompatible versions of mesa with vulkan drivers etc.
read again, there is a disclaimer. FYI of the entire mesa-stack that you speak of, manjaro has only replaced mesa package only, rest of the stack is as is from arch. (atleast for now)
i find the same set of packages in both PKGBUILD (here is arch’s PKGBUILD for comparison) there are indeed 8 packages involved, but they are the same. BTW arch mesa has an additional patch, that manjaro does not :-p
of the packages in question, to-date, manjaro has only altered package “mesa”, the rest of it is still inherited as built by arch.
i know this is only relevant for now(this build), but what are the pitfalls in substituting manjaro’s package with arch’s
All the split packages in mesa and lib32-mesa are now built by Manjaro, without patent encumbered codec support. That means you need to replace all of the core and split packages if you want hardware acceleration back without messing up your system.
This is basically no solution and less experienced people are left out in the dark!
This should’ve been communicated with the community before any changes were made, to try finding a different solution, but it didn’t happen.
When will the rest of the patent infringing stuff be removed? It seems the Intel VAAPI drivers are still there, along with x264 and x265. Fedora doesn’t ship any of that.
If I understand correctly, for the time being that change only affects hardware acceleration of these codecs via GPU, so you can still de/encode using your CPU - which might or might not work for you.
At the very least it will slightly increase the electricity bill, but on a laptop, with a weaker CPU or for 4k material it might very well make a very noticeable difference.
However, there’s another thing that makes me wonder. Fedora removed the acceleration and doesn’t actually offer the respective codecs by default, so they are indeed “free of patent encumbered codecs” - while Manjaro still does offer them (via software decoding), doesn’t it?
So either this will change as well down the line, the potential legal issues only involve hardware acceleration (in which case Intel and nVidia should be an issue as well, even though they don’t use vaapi), or this is a very inconsistent “solution”.
Fedora has a deal with Cisco to distribute OpenH264, the package must come from Cisco’s servers since they pay the royalties.
I don’t know where people get the idea that the patent issue is only hardware decoding or only Mesa. The Mesa implementation was an overlooked bit that Fedora recently disabled to remain compliant.
Yes, as I said the patent issues aren’t just with hardware acceleration.
Manjaro should be removing x264, x265 and even OpenH264 unless they strike a deal with Cisco. Otherwise they should return Mesa back to the way it was because they aren’t compliant anyway.