HEVC Hardware acceleration in Chrome/Brave/Chromium

[H3lloW0r7D]

I am new to Linux, please excuse me if I am missing important details.
Running EndeavourOS with 6.18.22-1-lts and Wayland I noticed that hardware accelerated hevc playback is not working for most chromium related programs:
Ive got a hevc file and a player only allowing direct play, no transcoding. Firefox plays the file fine, while Brave/Chromium/Chrome never start playing the file at all.
Also other electron apps have problems when loading a hevc file: “File is not natively supported.” is for example stated by the tool LoslessCut.

My GPU is “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti”

When I start playing the file and monitor with brave://media-internals/ I see the following interesting parts:

VaapiVideoDecoder: failed Initialize()ing the frame pool

and

   {
    "time": 2120.279000000097,
    "key": "error",
    "value": {
      "cause": {
        "code": 1,
        "data": {},
        "group": "DecoderStatus::1",
        "message": "",
        "stack": [
          "~{media/gpu/vaapi/vaapi_video_decoder.cc%1211}~"
        ]
      },
      "code": 3,
      "data": {},
      "group": "PipelineStatus::PIPELINE_ERROR_DECODE",
      "message": "",
      "stack": [
        "~{media/renderers/video_renderer_impl.cc%612}~"
      ]
    }
  }

The whole log: https://paste.c-net.org/MorninFaded

The above output was produced with this launch args:

–enable-features=AcceleratedVideoEncoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,PlatformHEVCEncoderSupport,WebRtcAllowH265Send,WebRtcAllowH265Receive %U

But I tried all other combinations I found in this thread.

My vainfo output is:

Trying display: wayland
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.23 (libva 2.22.0)
vainfo: Driver version: VA-API NVDEC driver [direct backend]
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP8Version0_3 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain12 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444_10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444_12 : VAEntrypointVLD

Ive got the following packages installed that could somehow be related to my problem:

local/egl-gbm 1.1.3-1
The GBM EGL external platform library
local/egl-wayland 4:1.1.21-1
EGLStream-based Wayland external platform
local/egl-wayland2 1.0.1-1
EGLStream-based Wayland external platform (2)
local/egl-x11 1.0.5-1
NVIDIA XLib and XCB EGL Platform Library
local/libnvidia-container 1.19.0-1
NVIDIA container runtime library
local/libva-nvidia-driver 0.0.16-1
VA-API implementation that uses NVDEC as a backend
local/libvdpau 1.5-4
Nvidia VDPAU library
local/libxnvctrl 595.58.03-1
NVIDIA NV-CONTROL X extension
local/linux-firmware-nvidia 20260309-1
Firmware files for Linux - Firmware for NVIDIA GPUs and SoCs
local/nouveau-fw 340.108-1
This package provides video & pgraph firmwares for all NVIDIA chipsets that need them
local/nvidia-container-toolkit 1.19.0-1
NVIDIA container toolkit
local/nvidia-hook 1.5.3-1
pacman hook for nvidia
local/nvidia-open-dkms 595.58.03-1
NVIDIA open kernel modules - module sources
local/nvidia-settings 595.58.03-1
Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
local/nvidia-utils 595.58.03-1
NVIDIA drivers utilities
local/opencl-nvidia 595.58.03-1
OpenCL implemention for NVIDIA

also those env got defined by me:

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia
MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1
NVD_BACKEND=direct

The nvidia-smi output is:

brave://gpu/ outputs the following:

Can someone bring any light into my situation? I will definetly look on and post a solution should I find one but I am also open to any hint.

Thanks

Edit:

Made some tests with AI assisting me. Here is the report, also generated by AI:

https://paste.c-net.org/SmashJafar

[dalto]

@H3lloW0r7D

nouveau-fw

You probably don’t want this one installed.

Have you tried using a local video player that supports VAAPI to see if it is a system problem or a browser settings problem?

[H3lloW0r7D]

I read somewhere that it is required for vaapi, but it didnt cause any change at all. I just removed it again and tried all the different flags again with the same result as before.

Like mentioned above Firefox itself doesnt has any problem with hardware acceleration and also mpv aswell Haruna are doing fine

Its really only on Electron/Chromium based projects.

[Hyrules]

To my knowledge HEVC or X.265 does not work on chromium based browser and Nvidia on linux (at least not hardware decoding). I’m presonnally following a couple of threads about this on other forums. The flags that once worked does not work anymore. it’s possible to make it work but you have to recompile the browsers with patches that Thorium browser made. I wouldn’t recommend Thorium as it’s infrequently updated.

GitHub - Alex313031/thorium: Chromium fork named after radioactive element No....

PR that someone made for Brave Browser which is Chromium based (still waiting on the go from Brave because licences) :

Enable HEVC/H.265 software video decoding on Linux (#34796)

Nvidia Request about vulkan and video decoding

Chromium

Issue about Chrome not supporting hardware acceleration on linux

Chromium

Nvidia has even offered to develop the chromium part that uses vulkan in order to decode video on hardware. Chromium as usual is sleeping at the steering wheel… Firefox works fine if you want HEVC as I use it to view my Unifi security camera.

You can try many flags that you see on the web but lately they don’t really seem to work.

[H3lloW0r7D]

Thanks a lot for writing down such a detailed answer! This combined with the note in the nvidia-vaapi-driver repo, “Chrome is currently unsupported, and will not function.”, convinced me to make the switch.
Dealing with all the flags and hoping that nothing breaks is kinda annoying compared to firefox working out of the box while chrome doesnt really offer any benefit over firefox for me.

[Bink]

@H3lloW0r7D

“Chrome is currently unsupported, and will not function.”, convinced me to make the switch.
Dealing with all the flags and hoping that nothing breaks is kinda annoying compared to firefox working out of the box while chrome doesnt really offer any benefit over firefox for me.

This is by no means me saying you should use one or other (Chromium or Firefox).

I just thought I’d mention that while Firefox may seemingly have video decoding support, it is all-around an objectively much slower browser than Chromium. So you might have hardware video decoding, but that’s about the only performance advantage.

That said, use it if it’s what you like, or perhaps LibreWolf which doesn’t carry the telemetry baggage at least (but probably still no faster).