Mozilla Firefox 97 fixes hardware video acceleration on Linux

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Firefox 97 was released this week, and on paper it didn’t seem to deliver anything significant for a major update. Well, there are changes that the release notes didn’t mention.

Firefox on Linux had an issue with hardware video acceleration for a while. The problem can be reproduced, when the preference is enabled, the browser may not render videos correctly or not play them.

Many users reported that the problem was fixed in Firefox 97, except that the solution is not enabled by default.

How to Enable Hardware Video Acceleration in Firefox on Linux

1. Open the Firefox preferences page by typing about:config in the address bar. Accept the warning about potential risks and continue. You know the chorus.

2. Find the following preference.

media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled

3. The option value is set to False by default. Set the value to True.

Note: You can also set the “media.rdd-vpx.enabled” preference to “true”.

What does changing the preference do? It tells the browser to use the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) to play videos. Try playing web videos and performance should be less taxing on your CPU.

Hardware acceleration is often misunderstood by users, I’ve seen comments randomly suggesting users to disable the feature. If the web pages are not loading correctly, i.e. they are empty, you can try disabling the setting as a workaround, but this should be a last resort. Your ad blocker, your VPN, your DNS settings can all play a part in the incorrect loading of pages. I had a similar issue with Chromium based browsers in my Windows 11 VM where some browser buttons were not rendering and I had to disable hardware acceleration (not related to HW video acceleration) to make them work. But, that’s a rare scenario, and usually related to video drivers, in my case it was a virtual machine, so that was probably the problem.

Some people think hardware acceleration uses more resources and turning it off would help the program run better. It’s actually quite the opposite, hardware acceleration uses your graphics card (GPU) to render the visual elements of web pages and to play videos. By disabling this option, you are telling the browser not to use the GPU and instead rely on the CPU for such tasks. This causes a higher than normal load on your processor, which impacts your system performance. Even if you don’t have a dedicated graphics card, you should keep the option enabled for best results.

Project Fission is enabled in Firefox 97

This is another thing that went unnoticed in the changelog and also applies to Windows users. Firefox 97 enables Project Fission by default. The Site Isolation option, introduced last year, provides an additional layer of security to protect your data. The about:config preference for Fission is fission.autostart. This value is set to True. Here is the related Bugzilla discussion,

I updated to the latest version yesterday and haven’t had any issues since. But, if you are having problems after updating to Firefox 97, you can try changing the option value to false to see if that fixes the problem.

Have you enabled hardware video acceleration in Firefox? Do you notice a difference in performance after changing the setting?

Summary

Some users claim that Firefox 97 fixed hardware video acceleration issues on <a class=Linux” width=”180″ data-lazy-srcset=”https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/enable-hardware-video-acceleration-in-Firefox-on-Linux.jpg” data-lazy-src=”https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/enable-hardware-video-acceleration-in-Firefox-on-Linux.jpg”/>

Article name

Some users claim that Firefox 97 fixed hardware video acceleration issues on Linux

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Firefox 97 reportedly fixed hardware video acceleration issues on Linux. But you will need to change a setting for it to work properly.

Author

Ashvin

Editor

Ghacks Technology News

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