I’m Fedora 44 cosmic on a MacBook Pro medio 2015 (a1398) with nvidia 750m graphics card and cannot figure out how to enable hardware graphics encoding in firefox.
Right now if I try to play a video i.e. in YouTube the sounds works, but the video lags.
On the about:support page in Firefox it says: WebRender (Software)
I have tried following these guides with no success:
glxinfo | grep "profile version"
returns this output
Max core profile version: 4.5
Max compat profile version: 4.5
Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.2
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 26.0.6
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 26.0.6
There are a couple of different, but related, complications…
First is that YouTube (for various good reasons) has lately been favoring streaming videos in VP9 format.
Second, the bad news is the GeForce GT 750M was released in April 2013 before VP9, so the it doesn’t support hardware decoding.
So the combination above results in video lag no matter which web browser or media player is used.
In Firefox’s about:support page, under the Media section, hopefully the “Codec Support Information” block says that H.264 hardware decoding is available (which the 750M does support).
If so, check out the enhanced-h264ify add-on for Firefox which blocks all video codecs from YouTube except H.264.
Even worse is that the 750M is only supported by the legacy nvidia driver version 470 which does not support wayland and only works with X11. X11 has been completely removed from both the workstation and kde editions of fedora.
There are some spins of fedora that do still support x11. If you were to install one of them, as well as enabling the proper rpmfusion repos and installed the akmod-nvidia-470xx package you can enable HW acceleration on that gpu.
The problem is Firefox says it uses WebRender (software) which means it doesn’t even try to use the GPU, and under codec support information it says H264 hardware decoding/encoding unsupported.
I have an older dell xps also with NVIDIA geforce 750m but running latest pop os (also with wayland and using Nouveau driver) and her Firefox reports WebRender (so using the GPU) and H264 hardware decoding/encoding supported
So it seems like that some codec or the like is missing when running Fedora.
I will try to install POP OS on my mac to see if it behaves like on my dell.
Hi I have tried following the guide - I have installed all the codes and installing each of the drivers(only one driver at a time) without any luck.
I think the problem is, it does not use hardware accelerating at all, about:support on firefox says: WebRender (Software) should only says WebRender if hardware accelerating was enabled. I have tried installing pop os which has hardware acceleration enabled out of the box. So it is at least possible to have, but something is missing on Fedora.
Please show us the output of inxi -Fzxx on fedora so we may see the overall hardware and driver configs. Post that as preformatted text using the </> button on the toolbar so we can see it formatted as seen on-screen.
Also show us the output of dnf list --installed \*nvidia\* \*codec\* and dnf repolist
accept things as they are and have no hardware acceleration.
install a version of fedora that does support X11 (or enable cosmic to support X11) then install the nvidia driver version 470xx from rpmfusion to enable hardware acceleration.
There are some here who use those older macbook machines and they may be able to provide additional guidance, but the key point is that in order to have hardware acceleration the nvidia gpu must run with a proper driver to enable it.