FriendlyELEC-Forum

The wiki says that Chromium hardware video decoding is enabled in Friendlydesktop on the NanoPC-T4, but this does not appear to be true. The video acceleration status shows as enabled in chrome://gpu but this link shows that the information shown in chrome://gpu is meaningless. Further tests have proven that hardware video decoding is not used in Friendlydesktop: the CPU usage is very high and runs very hot when playing video. Information in chrome://media-internals shows FFMpeg decoder in use which is a software decoder.

Is video acceleration supposed to be working in Friendlydesktop? Or is the flag and screenshot in the wiki simply a marketing tactic? This isn't my primary use case but I'd still like to know how it's actually supposed to work. Is it worth going through the steps to install a patched version of Chromium to enable this, or is it impossible to enable hardware video decoding in a browser on the NanoPC-T4?

1. Install Chromium with VA-API support.

Chromium with VA-API support is available in two PPA repositories - one which has Chromium Beta and another one with Chromium Dev. Choose one from the 2 (and only add one)! The Beta PPA should be more stable.

2. Install the VA-API driver

3. Search for the Hardware-accelerated video decode option in chrome://flags and enable it

4. Install h264ify Chrome extension