Debian: Cannot get hardware acceleration in Firefox

CryptGoat@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 19 points –

Can anyone explain to me how I can get hardware acceleration to work in Firefox running on Debian? I have tried both default the packaged ESR and the the latest Firefox release directly form Mozilla.

All I ever get is "blocked by platform" in about:support and I have tried everything suggested in the Debian and Arch wiki. 🤷
https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Hardware_Video_Acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration

Running Debian 12 / Bookworm, Xfce, using Intel HD Graphics 530 (I'm using an Intel Core i7-6820HQ).

Edit: Looks like I found the cause for my problems: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/474822

11

I have working hardware acceleration with the ESR version and media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config, works out of the box.

Did you verify that you get hardware acceleration with a tool like MVP outside of the browser? You can use vainfo and intel-gpu-tools to verify supported codecs and hardware utilization. The intel-media-va-driver-non-free drivers might also work.

Finally, youtube is a good site to test hardware acceleration, Netflix doesn't support hardware acceleration in Linux.

VLC and mpv are working just fine with hardware acceleration, confirmed it with intel_gpu_top.

Still nothing on Firefox. Launched it with MOZ_X11_EGL=1, media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled is set to true. Tested with YouTube, still nothing. 😑

Sorry, I am out of ideas. I am running Firefox via Gnome on Wayland. The only thing I changed was the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag within Firefox-ESR, everything else should be default (plus Firefox plugins which should not be relevant). Perhaps you could try to run Firefox-ESR with a new/default profile were you only change the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled flag? Or a Debian live-cd with Gnome/Wayland?

@CryptGoat Did you try the flatpak version?

Thanks or the suggestion. The Flatpak is indeed doing just fine but it's not an option for a number of reasons, such as the Flatpak version not working with certain addons (KeePassXC-Browser cannot connect to KeePassXC).