Chrome in Ubuntu 21.10 only achieves video acceleration with VP9, not with H.264, resulting in higher CPU usage

Question

I'm checking with the developers tools, and with VP9 on youtube, I get Vpx decode, but with H264, I get FFMpeg only.

I'm launching with the flags:

--ignore-gpu-blocklist --use-gl=desktop --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder 

Answer 1

I achieved both VP9 and H.264 (lower CPU load), in Chrome 99 with:

/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --use-gl=desktop --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder %U

Thanks Michal.

Answer 2

Don't be confused by the several decoder names.

VpxVideoDecoder is software decoding as well. You can easily verify this by pressing F12 while a VP9 video is played, to open Development Tools. Let it show the "Media" tab, and you will see "Hardware decoder: False" when VpxVideoDecoder is used.

Answer 3

@KPrv's answer almost worked for me, just had to replace --use-gl=desktop with --use-gl=egl