Packages for Firefox audio hardware decode

I’m trying to find out which packages are needed for hardware audio decoding in Firefox, the ffmpeg/gstreamer/ good|bad|ugly/mesa/libav/free|world|nonfree etc situation is so confusing. I’ve tried installing about a dozen different combinations but so far no luck, does anyone perhaps have an idea?

Codec Name Software Decoding Hardware Decoding
H264 Supported Supported
VP9 Supported Supported
VP8 Supported Unsupported
AV1 Supported Supported
HEVC Unsupported Unsupported
AAC Supported Unsupported
MP3 Supported Unsupported
Opus Supported Unsupported
Vorbis Supported Unsupported
FLAC Supported Unsupported
Wave Supported Unsupported

On my system I have

  • libavcodec-freeworld
  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld
  • gstreamer1-plugins-ugly
  • ffmpeg
  • libheif-freeworld
  • vlc-plugins-freeworld
  • x264
  • x265
  • mozilla-openh264
  • openh264

and my system works well with all the multimedia files I have tried.

All those packages come from either the rpmfusion-free, the rpmfusion-nonfree, or the fedora-cisco-openh264 repos and were installed using sudo dnf install <package names> --allowerasing so they pull in the additional dependencies and remove the conflicting fedora packages.

I cannot check how mine compares to yours since you did not provide the command used to get that output.

Thanks Jeff, i don’t have the first 3 of those packages here. I’ll try adding them tomorrow and see what they do.

It’s from the Firefox codec support overview that is visible by typing about:support in the address bar.

Mine shows everything unsupported in the hardware column and everything but HEVC supported in the software column.

You apparently have different hardware so some is supported on hardware for your system.
I do not regularly use firefox so have no need to manipulate it for my purposes.

Those three packages provide most of the codecs that are not directly available from fedora and greatly expands the range of multimedia you can use.

Unfortunately installing the first 3 packages in your list that i was missing didn’t ‘unlock’ the audio codecs for me, so i still wonder how and if that could be done.

On my laptop all showed as unsupported in the hardware column as well, until i installed mesa-va-drivers, which is weirdly small:

mesa-va-drivers    

Mesa-based VA-API video acceleration drivers

Total size of inbound packages is 20 KiB. Need to download 20 KiB.

That unlocked hardware decoding of the vp9 and av1 codecs, but not h264.

So i removed it again and installed mesa-va-drivers-freeworld from rpmfusion, which is a 40MB installation:

Description: These drivers contains video acceleration codecs for decoding/encoding H.264 and H.265 algorithms and decoding only VC1 algorithm.

After that h264 turned green as well.

Using either ffmpeg-free from the base install or ffmpeg from rpmfusion does not seem to make a difference, both provide the same support in Firefox.

It’s all somewhat of a mess…

I’ll ping @kwizart as well, maybe he can tell us more about this? :wink: