Hardware accelaration on pi 4

first of all thanks to manjaroo team for their incredible job to make it possible to provide a full fledged desktop experience on a cheap sbc…

i heard that enabling hardware acceleration in firefox decreases cpu load by hugely while playing videos.

soooo anyone who knows how to enable it on pi 4 please assist…

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You can enable Hardware Acceleration in the options.

However, does the Pi actually have hardware acceleration for video encoding?

what does about://support say?

@mithrial OP wants to enable HW acceleration:

@lalit To enable hardware acceleration, you need the hardware to do that so an eGPU in the case of a Pi4 as the standard Pi4 doesn’t have a GPU

So if you:

  • do have an eGPU, please provide an inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width as that would be the minimum required information for us to be able to help you. (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
    Also, please copy-paste that output in-between 3 backticks ``` at the beginning and end of the code/text.
  • do not have one: well: no hardware, no hardware acceleration. :man_shrugging:

:thinking:

The Pi 4 does have a graphics chip capable of decoding video, see 1.2. in the document linked by @Fabby:

H.265 (HEVC) (upto 4Kp60 decode), H.264 (upto 1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)

But since Firefox only supports VAAPI for hardware acceleration (IIRC anyway) and there’s no VAAPI driver for the Pi graphics chip that I’m aware of there’s currently no way to use those hardware capabilities unfortunately.

4 Likes

does not sounds pretty, but thanks for your support.have a nice day

kindly check youtube ‘hardware acceleration on pi 4’ many desktopify version distros supports hardware acceleration

Sorry, not gonna look around for random Youtube videos, I can already tell you that Firefox does not currently support any other interface for video decoding other than VAAPI which the Raspberry Pi does not currently have drivers for.

However, you might be lucky with Chromium. There is a written guide you can find here: Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU) in Chromium - LeMaRiva|tech. This is supposed to work on the current Raspberry Pi OS (though I have not tested it, so don’t take my word for it). Now, I don’t know if the version of Chromium shipped with RPi OS is a special patched version specifically for the Pi and if so, if Manjaro ships the same version, but you could at least give it a try.