FreeTube: Is there a way to enable hardware acceleration?

General system Applications
1

I use a combination of flags in order to enable hardware acceleration in Chromium.

Launching the FreeTube’s bin from the terminal with the same flags doesn’t seem to enable hardware acceleration.

Is there a way to do it?

2

How did you figure out that FreeTubeApp is not using Hardware acceleration?

3

Being an Electron-based app it runs essentially on Chromium technology so you could press Fn12 to access the DevTools.

Once there, click on the kebab menu, more tools, media. Look under Video Decoder.

On my end it says: Hardware decoder false.

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4

If you can’t enable hardware acceleration internally, you can use the external player, in the mpv configuration file, set the hwdec option according to your GPU.

For AMD, for example :

hwdec=vaapi

Listing all the hwdec options :

mpv --hwdec=help
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5

Thanks for the reply!

For MPV, I do that already.

I thought perhaps a similar method as for enabling hardware acceleration for Chromium may exist for FreeTube which basically uses the same technology. Maybe I am not thinking correctly about it.

6

I checked with Firefox package, it does use FFMEPG. When I looked at the chromium package in Arch repositories it depends on libva, which takes care of getting and enabling the hardware acceleration with the appropriate GPU drivers.

However when I looked at FreeTube Bin package in AUR I do not see any such dependency, i.e. either MPV or FFMEPG or LIBVA or something equivalent. Does FreeTube Bin use MPV or does it package software encoders inside the package itself? Anf if FreeTube Bin is based on Chromium then does it require/use libva package?

7

It can use MPV, but it doesn’t by default, it is an option that can be set within FreeTube (among other local player options).

So I would presume it is using the native Chromium player otherwise.