Broken rendering and video playback on Firefox / Fedora 40

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Video playback on latest Firefox from the fedora repos on Silverblue is broken. Super choppy (< 1 fps), hangs most of the Firefox UI and requires the process to be killed. AMD GPU on Wayland, which has been working just fine for years now.

Video playback works fine with Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox from Flathub, so the regression in on Fedora’s repos.

VA-API seems to be initialised fine, and even if it wasn’t, this machine is beefy enough to be able to render unaccelerated video anyway, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Logs and stdout are unhelpful.

Affects Silverblue 40.20240430.0 to 40.20240503.0 at least. I don’t have earlier version to test with.

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I don’t get it. Wasn’t VA-API and video acceleration enabled by default on Fedora? Martin Stransky enabled it by default since Firefox 77 (Firefox on Fedora finally gets VA-API on Wayland. – Martin Stransky's Blog)

Now about:support on Firefox running in Safe Mode says:

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and

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media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled is set to false?

I’m not sure what’s going on. Running on an AMD RX 6800 XT on hyprland

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In fact, even rendering of pages is absolutely broken. Navigating bugzilla.redhat.com causes massive lag spikes.

Again, no issues with the flatpak version. Found a related issue: 2278600 – overall gfx performance issues with firefox drawing content and media playback

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I don’t know how more people aren’t talking about this. I needed to start using another browser. Apparently it was after the last kernel update. Firefox is performing poorly. Fedora 40 on AMD 6000h series integrated GPU in wayland

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As I understand it, this changed in 2022: The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions [LWN.net]

I don’t know about hardware decoding for codecs other than H.264/H.265, though.

For what it’s worth, though, I’ve been able to playback video at normal speeds with software decoding in RPM Firefox on Fedora Silverblue 40 on a hybrid Intel/NVIDIA laptop.