Hardware accelerated video decoding on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS?

Which Khadas SBC do you use?

VIM3 Pro

Which system do you use? Android, Ubuntu, OOWOW or others?

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Which version of system do you use? Khadas official images, self built images, or others?

Installed as 20.04 LTS from Krescue, now OOWOW, then upgraded via do-release-upgrade.

Please describe your issue below:

Is it possible to use hardware accelerated video decoding in any browser on Ubuntu? I’ve tried hard with Chromium and Firefox, but I can’t get it to work. All I get is software rendering and the highest resolution without too many dropped frames is FullHD @ 30 fps. I was hoping Wayland on 22.04 LTS could make a difference, but no, the results are the same as with 20.04 LTS.

Hello @christian5271

There is no hardware video decoding under the browser.

Is there any other Linux distro / browser combination known to support hardware accelerated video decoding on the VIM3?

No browser support hardware decoding on arm devices. You can get hwdec only on kodi gbm or Wayland or mpv but not browser.

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OK, I tried mpv and the best result I could get was with mpv --fullscreen --vo=gpu --hwdec=auto <URL>. However, with UHD (3840x2160) at 25 FPS I get a lot of dropped frames to a level it’s noticeable and not usable. Is this the best the VIM3 Pro can do or am I missing some parameter/setting? I’m using the mpv that comes preinstalled with the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS image installed via OOWOW.

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+1 is there any better way to play hardware decoded videos on linux using mpv or any other player?

For video playback we suggest you to use CoreELEC.

I think we missing the point of this topic. CoreElec is distro how this OS will help me with my need to be able to control video playback with hardware decoding from command line? Does CoreElec have some special player/lib which will allow me to do that without kodi and UI ?