Firefox 76 Enabling VA-API Wayland Acceleration For All Video Codecs

With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended.

There has been the bug report to track VP9 decode support using VA-API. That was done by Red Hat's Martin Stránský who has been leading this Wayland and VA-API work.

As of Wednesday, support was merged so VA-API on Wayland uses all video formats available. Up until now (and for Firefox 75) there was code limiting the support to the H.264 codec while for Firefox 76 those limitations are set to be cleared.

At least thanks to Mozilla's more rapid release calendar for Firefox, this means users wanting the expanded VA-API acceleration on Wayland just need to wait around 5 May for the stable release.