Can anyone explain to me how I can get hardware acceleration to work in Firefox running on Debian? I have tried both default the packaged ESR and the the latest Firefox release directly form Mozilla.

All I ever get is “blocked by platform” in about:support and I have tried everything suggested in the Debian and Arch wiki. 🤷
https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Hardware_Video_Acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration

Running Debian 12 / Bookworm, Xfce, using Intel HD Graphics 530 (I’m using an Intel Core i7-6820HQ).

Edit: Looks like I found the cause for my problems: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/474822

  • @[email protected]English
    3•2 years ago

    I have working hardware acceleration with the ESR version and media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config, works out of the box.

    Did you verify that you get hardware acceleration with a tool like MVP outside of the browser? You can use vainfo and intel-gpu-tools to verify supported codecs and hardware utilization. The intel-media-va-driver-non-free drivers might also work.

    Finally, youtube is a good site to test hardware acceleration, Netflix doesn’t support hardware acceleration in Linux.

    • CryptGoatOPEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      VLC and mpv are working just fine with hardware acceleration, confirmed it with intel_gpu_top.

      Still nothing on Firefox. Launched it with MOZ_X11_EGL=1, media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled is set to true. Tested with YouTube, still nothing. 😑

      • @[email protected]English
        0•2 years ago

        Sorry, I am out of ideas. I am running Firefox via Gnome on Wayland. The only thing I changed was the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag within Firefox-ESR, everything else should be default (plus Firefox plugins which should not be relevant). Perhaps you could try to run Firefox-ESR with a new/default profile were you only change the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag? Or a Debian live-cd with Gnome/Wayland?

        • CryptGoatOPEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          Well, looks like I have found the cause: the TearFree set to true appears to block HW compositing / acceleration in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/intel_graphics#Tearing I have now removed the config file and hardware accelerated video decoding now works just fine while running both Xfce and KDE Plasma.

          Thanks for all the input!