Hardware Video Encoding seems broken on Arch Linux with an AMD RX 7800 XT
I have a problem where if I install the packages needed to get hardware video decoding working in firefox it completely breaks YouTube playback. I can't find any info on the internet about the problem and I am having a lot of trouble with it. YouTube playback with libva-mesa-driver and libva-vdpau-driver will start stop restart start playing audio then crash with a this error every single time. I am at my wits end trying to figure out this problem and I would love help figuring out the problem I am using firefox-developer-edition as a note thanks Ozzy
Gewysig op
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sorry about the typo in the name I didn't see that until after I posted
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the question title is resolved but the real problem of hardware acceleration being broken for my 7800 XT on Arch Linux is still the main problem here thanks for that tho
another thing I noticed is using the browser refresh feature will temp fix it but it the problem comes back its like browser performance degradation. Also refreshing Firefox is the nuclear option and I would prefer not to do that. IDK if I discovered a bug with RDNA 3 cards and hardware acceleration with VAAPI on Firefox but for the time being until I can get hardware acceleration working I've just turned it off its not ideal and I would like hardware acceleration to work but until this is fixed. I'll have to leave without hardware acceleration
Does this happen with any specific codec (right-click on the video and select "Stats for nerds")? Try changing media.av1.enabled to false in about:config.
Does it still happen with the flatpak package?
Try installing newer or older Mesa drivers.
zeroknight said
Does this happen with any specific codec (right-click on the video and select "Stats for nerds")? Try changing media.av1.enabled to false in about:config. Does it still happen with the flatpak package? Try installing newer or older Mesa drivers.
it doesn't seem to be specific to any codecs from what I can tell and I am using the arch package not the flatpak for firefox developer edition
the problem seems to be mostly with YouTube and sometimes with Twitch Netflix works just fine so idk
since the problem seems to lay mostly with YouTube it might have to do with the codecs YouTube uses but its weird
YouTube was working fine til a recent update I would say maybe a couple of days to a week ago not really sure but I suspect there might have been a commit that made its way into Firefox developer edition that broke hardware decoding for the 7800 XT but I'm not 100% sure that is the problem I am considering downgrading Firefox to an older version to see if the problems go away to see if it was something introduced in a recent version of Firefox
I was running an older version of Firefox 125.0b9 and noticed this error during the problems with YouTube WARNING: Decoder=7ef967e18d00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005): file /usr/src/debug/firefox-developer-edition/firefox-125.0/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:167
also the problem seems to be less serve on versions of Firefox before Firefox 126.0b1 tho they are still there YouTube just doesn't fully crash this time
ok so downgrading to Firefox 125.0b9 helped a lot instead of crashing it just struggles to handle HD playback so something was introduced in 126.0b1 that is causing issues for hardware decoding on AMD in my case the RX 7800 XT
nvm I was just getting lucky I am still having the problem on 125.0b9
downgrading doesn't seem to fix the problem I was mistaken
my guess is there is a problem with libva-vdpau-driver libva-mesa-driver and firefox there is probably an incompatibility I am going to try one last thing that being running firefox in xwayland
running firefox with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 helps but that tells me its not using wayland for rendering by default
it works for a bit but then goes back to crashing the youtube video player
the only thing that seems to be working to fix the issue is disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox all together which is something I really don't want to do