Hardware Video Decoding

Discussions center on hardware-accelerated video decoding in web browsers, especially H.264 and VP9 support, with frequent debates about its performance and enablement on Linux versus Windows/macOS, and across GPUs like Intel and NVIDIA.

📉 Falling 0.3x Hardware
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Keywords

CPU A20 A5 youtube.com bountysource.com AV1 mozilla.org GPU HDR OBS decoding hardware video acceleration gpu intel decode hw linux 264

Sample Comments

mort96 Nov 21, 2025 View on HN

H.264 is still hardware accelerated, isn't it?

mkoubaa Feb 22, 2025 View on HN

I'm shocked there still isn't a hardware accelerator for video decoding.

samoa42 Jan 10, 2021 View on HN

probably because h264 en-/decoding is supported in hardware even on dated platforms

attentive Jan 1, 2024 View on HN

Does it do video hardware decoding in the browser? - I tried it and it didn't do it on nvidia.

mcav Feb 15, 2010 View on HN

Not when you have a hardware H264 chip.

RussianCow Mar 7, 2017 View on HN

I think this is only true on Linux. On my Windows and macOS installs, hardware video decoding works fine.

navjack27 Jan 27, 2020 View on HN

It is using hardware decoding in the browser. Try playing a YouTube video on an old computer with no hardware decode or an OS with it lacking like Haiku.

jhasse Feb 15, 2019 View on HN

No hardware video decoding on Linux ...

pantalaimon Mar 3, 2024 View on HN

You probably didn’t have Hardware Video Decoding enabled in the browser, that’s still not the default on Linux.

lost_tourist Nov 8, 2023 View on HN

wouldn't that only be true if your hardware doesn't have the decoder isn't built into the hardware of your gpu?