Linux uses Widevine that's shipped in the desktop version of Chrome or Firefox, which is Widevine 元, which only supports software decoding. Basically, it's made by Apple for Apple ecosystem. FairPlay, used in Safari and Apple devices.PlayReady, used in MS Edge on Windows 10-11 (sorry, Linux version of MS Edge doesn't support PlayReady), TVs, and TV Boxes.Basically, this is the standard technology on Google ecosystem. Widevine, used in Chrome/Chromium browsers, Chrome OS, Firefox, and Android devices.There are 3 popular DRM technologies being used to protect online streaming video contents: Therefore, you can expect to see hardware acceleration for video decoding on every Linux browsers soon.Ĭaveat: hardware acceleration on DRM protected videos See Chromium issue #1236697 for more info. On Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers, you will not get hardware acceleration for video decoding on Linux unless you use a custom-built version of Chromium which only available on some Linux distros, for instance, on Raspberry Pi OS that ships a modified version of Chromium through the Pi-Apps.Ĭurrently, the team on Chromium are working hard to get the video hardware acceleration working on Linux, as this is set to level 1 priority on their issues list. You can see in this Fedora Wiki page for more info on how to set up Firefox for video hardware acceleration.

Sadly, video hardware acceleration on Linux web browsers only available on Firefox version 101 or above. Well, if you watch a lot of videos on YouTube in FHD or 4K, especially on a low-end PC, you would likely need those videos to be hardware accelerated on your web browser. The fastest processing unit for video decoding is Graphics Processing Unit or GPU for short. What is hardware acceleration? Basically, if a computer task is programmed to use the fastest/specialized processing unit for that task, it's considered to be hardware accelerated. Hardware acceleration for video decoding on Linux web browsers However, don't hold your breath, take it with a grain of salt as no one knows exactly when these issues will be fixed. Therefore, I think it would be worth mentioning in this post. Nevertheless, I have to face these issues as a Fedora 36 user. Note that, the issues don't need to be directly related to Linux, Fedora, or GNOME. I will focus on the issues that would likely affect everyone's daily tasks on their computer, hence should be fixed as soon as possible. Today, I will talk about the issues that are presenting on Fedora 36 or Linux in general, but they are in the process of being fixed.

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