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Install Chromium with VAAPI on Fedora 30

·817 words·4 mins·
Chromium Fedora Linux
Table of Contents

UPDATE: The chromium-vaapi package is now chromium-freeworld. This post was updated on 2019-11-06 to include the change. See the end of the post for the update steps.

If you use a web browser to watch videos on a laptop, you’ve probably noticed that some videos play without much impact on the battery. Other videos cause the fans to spin wildly and your battery life plummets.

Intel designed a specification called VA API, often called VAAPI (without the space), and it offers up device drivers to applications running on your system. It provides a pathway for those applications to access certain parts of the graphics processing hardware directly. This increases performance, lowers CPU usage, and increases battery life.

In this post, you will learn how to get VAAPI working on your Fedora 30 system and how to use it along with a Chromium build that has VAAPI patches already included. There are some DRM-related workarounds as well toward the end.

Note: Keep in mind that some videos are in formats that are difficult to accelerate with a GPU and some applications support acceleration with some formats but not others. You may find that your favorite site still uses the same amount of CPU as it did before you completed this guide. 😢

Getting started with VAAPI #

You will need a few packages before you get started, and some of these depend on the type of GPU that is present in your system. In my case, I’m on a 4th generation Lenovo X1 Carbon, and it has an Skylake GPU:

$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07)

Fedora 30 has quite a few VAAPI packages available:

$ sudo dnf list all | grep libva | awk '{print $1}'
libva.x86_64
libva-intel-driver.x86_64
libva-intel-hybrid-driver.x86_64
libva-utils.x86_64
libva-vdpau-driver.x86_64
libva.i686
libva-devel.i686
libva-devel.x86_64
libva-intel-driver.i686
libva-intel-hybrid-driver.i686
libva-vdpau-driver.i686

My Intel GPU requires these packages:

$ sudo dnf install libva libva-intel-driver \
    libva-vdpau-driver \
    libva-utils

At this point, you should be able to run vainfo to ensure that everything is working:

$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.4.1
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_4
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.4 (libva 2.4.1)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 2.3.0
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointFEI
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointFEI
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointFEI
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointEncPicture
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD

If you run into a problem like this one, try installing the libva-intel-hybrid-driver:

$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.4.1
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

Installing Chromium with VAAPI support #

Now that we have a pathway for applications to talk to our GPU, we can install Chromium with VAAPI support:

$ sudo dnf -y install chromium-freeworld

Run chromium-freeworld to ensure Chromium starts properly. Visit chrome://flags in the Chromium browser and search for ignore-gpu-blacklist. Choose Enabled in the dropdown and press Relaunch Now in the bottom right corner.

After the relaunch, check some common video sites, like YouTube or DailyMotion. The CPU usage may be a bit lower on these, but you can lower it further by installing the h264ify extension. It forces some sites to provide h264 video rather than other CPU hungry formats.

Dealing with DRM #

The only remaining problem is DRM. Some sites, like Netflix or YouTube TV, require that the browser can handle DRM content. The Widevine DRM module is required for some of these sites, but it is automatically bundled with Chrome. The regular Chrome (not Chromium) package contains the module at: /opt/google/chrome/libwidevinecdm.so.

First, ensure Chromium is not running. Then copy that module over to Chromium’s directory:

sudo cp /opt/google/chrome/libwidevinecdm.so /usr/lib64/chromium-freeworld/

Start chromium-freeworld one more time and try out some DRM-protected sites like Netflix and they should be working properly.

As I mentioned at the start of the guide, some applications support acceleration with certain video formats and not others, so your results may vary.

New package: chromium-freeworld #

When this post was first written, the chromium package was called chromium-vaapi. It now chromium-freeworld. The upgrade is seamless since the new package obsoletes the old one, but you need one extra step to bring over the DRM module to the new chromium library directory:

sudo cp /usr/lib64/chromium-vaapi/libwidevinecdm.so /usr/lib64/chromium-freeworld

Restart chromium-freeworld and you’re good to go again.