Igalia Continues Working On Wayland & Accelerated Media Decode In Chromium On Linux

Months ago we had reported on Igalia's efforts for improving hardware video/media acceleration on the Chromium browser stack for Linux and getting Chromium ready for Wayland but it's been relatively quiet since then with no status updates. Fortunately, a Phoronix reader pointed to a fresh round of ongoing work in this space.

Igalia is working on supporting the V4L2 VDA (Video Decode Acceleration) on the Linux desktop for video/image decode of H.264, VP8, VP9, etc. Up to now the V4L2 VDA support was just used on ARM and under Chrome OS. This is part of the consulting firm's work on delivering first-rate Wayland support for Chromium -- it's a task they have been working on for quite some time.

This Linux V4L2VDA work along with other Igalia improvements were freshly re-based this week onto their ozone-wayland-dev branch of Chromium.

It looks like some of their Linux/Wayland support improvements are trickling into mainline Chromium but there is still more work in needing to be merged before Chromium/Chrome will really take advantage of a modern Wayland-powered Linux stack.