Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU) in Chromium

Re:Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU)... by kusti8 on Friday October 09, 2020 @08:21PM (#24735721)

I was pretty active in the Raspberry Pi community around 4 years ago. Playing YouTube easily was a big problem and I tried making a lot of packages to solve this. I would also build Chromium to add widevine support for DRM content.

I also helped the Raspberry Pi Foundation around 4 years ago building and packaging their patched version of Chromium. What they essentially did was directly modify the Chromium source to add HW decoding specifically for the Pi with MMAL. Then, an extension would be auto installed to enable H264 on YouTube instead of VP9. This was released back when they launched the Pixel desktop.

This obviously had some problems, because the patch needed to be manually changed for every release of Chromium, which come pretty often. It couldn't also be easily upstreamed. Looking at it now, it seems it hasn't been updated in about a year, and I'm curious what the Foundation's roadmap for this is in the future, after having been out of the loop for so long.

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Re:Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU)... by CameronNemo on Friday October 09, 2020 @08:29PM (#24735754)

FWIW Rockchip video decode/encode is not in a much better space.

There is the BSP, id est Rockchip's hacked together fork of the 4.4 kernel, which works. But on the mainline kernel h264 is just now getting added (maybe in 5.10), and userspace is still going to take some time to adapt.

I really hope that one day I can actually use the Pinebook Pro webcam for video chats without my CPU spinning while trying to encode (at least) one stream and decode N streams.

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Re:Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU)... by simcop2387 on Friday October 09, 2020 @09:54PM (#24736176)

It also doesn't help that youtube has almost complete dropped h264 these days either, every new video I've seen has been vp9 and av1 only lately.

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Re:Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU)... by m463 on Saturday October 10, 2020 @03:04AM (#24737143)

There must be h264 version available somehow for devices that don't do vp9/avi right?

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Re:Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU)... by microcolonel on Friday October 09, 2020 @10:49PM (#24736378)

> youtube has almost complete dropped h264 these days either

Only really true for VOD, and only really true for channels with 300k+ subs.

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