AV1 hardware decoding not working on AMD Renoir iGPU

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1

My setup is:

  • Acer Nitro 5 laptop, AMD Renoir iGPU, NVIDIA GTX 1650 dGPU
  • Fedora 40, GNOME 46.1, Wayland

Despite reports that AV1 hardware decoding should be available out of the box for AMD GPUs, Firefox reports as unsupported in about:support:
image

It doesn’t seem to be Firefox’s fault, actually: vainfo doesn’t report AV1 as available:

❯ vainfo
Trying display: wayland
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.21 (libva 2.21.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 24.1.5 for AMD Radeon Graphics (radeonsi, renoir, LLVM 18.1.6, DRM 3.57, 6.9.12-200.fc40.x86_64)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc

I am using ffmpeg from RPMFusion, and I followed the instructions on their Multimedia howto:

❯ rpm -qa ffmpeg\* mesa-va\*
ffmpeg-libs-6.1.1-15.fc40.x86_64
ffmpeg-6.1.1-15.fc40.x86_64
mesa-va-drivers-freeworld-24.1.5-1.fc40.x86_64

Still, no joy :disappointed:

So, before trying to tweak Firefox, it is my understanding that first I should be able to see AV1 on the above list. Can anyone share any tips on how to get this fixed?

2

There is a chance your AMD processor was released just slightly before AV1 support André.

If it is a Ryzen 4000 series, this could mean that it doesn’t natively has the support…

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3

Yes, that seems to be the most likely. If vainfodoesn’t report it, then the vaapi driver wasn’t built with support for it (not possible in this case, since @ocosta is using the rpmfusion version), or the hardware simply doesn’t have that functionality.

1 Like
4

Thanks guys, I guess you nailed it. It sounds stupid, but that hadn’t even crossed my mind. It makes total sense. My processor is a Ryzen 7 4800H, I couldn’t find detailed specs on AMD’s official product page, but I did find one for the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U, which doesn’t support AV1, so I can’t see why an older and inferior (non-Pro) processor would do.

At least that was an easy one :sweat_smile: Case closed.

5

It’s difficult to say from the outside sometimes, mine is a Ryzen 5 6600U for instance and that does support AV1. It’s all pretty opaque. :wink:

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6

Digging a little further, I found this. Only VP9, MPEG-2 and HEVC are supported :sob: So, software decoding it is…

7

Just for the record: Firefox allows you to completely disable AV1 via the media.av1.enable flag. Chrome doesn’t have a similar configuration AFAICS :face_with_diagonal_mouth: Only some extensions for Youtube.