Has something changed with HEVC support?

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Description of the issue: I can no longer playback my Frigate docker HEVC/H265 streams, this used to work OK. I am running on Fedora Linux. Chrome, Firefox still work fine. Brave used to…

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Try a test HEVC web page, eg https://devoldemar.github.io/hevc/

Expected result: Video plays

Brave Version( check About Brave):1.86.146

Additional Information:

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Ensure graphics acceleration is enabled.

HEVC doesn’t use any software based decoder on Chromium, only GPU decoding, so if graphics acceleration is off, it won’t work.

brave://gpu will show if acceleration is working, especially “Video Decode”.

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I see:

Graphics Feature Status

  • Canvas: Hardware accelerated
  • Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
  • Compositing: Hardware accelerated
  • Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
  • OpenGL: Enabled
  • Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
  • Raw Draw: Disabled
  • Skia Graphite: Disabled
  • TreesInViz: Disabled
  • Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
  • Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
  • Vulkan: Disabled
  • WebGL: Hardware accelerated
  • WebGPU: Hardware accelerated
  • WebNN: Disabled
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Hmmm, this implies it doesn’t work on Linux but I’m sure it was working….

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I’d be curious if it works on Chrome or even if can test on Brave Beta.

I was just trying to poke around online and was finding where people were talking about having to activate via the OS. For example:

I’m wondering if something kind of got lost there? Unfortunately I’ve never messed with Linux myself so the whole thing is completely out of touch for me. But figured I’d at least drop this little bit in just in case it sparks any thoughts for the two of you.

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I’ve only in VM’s been able to play HEVC with GPU acceleration on, without it, it doesn’t do ANY CPU fallback (I never tested if it’s the same on Windows because Windows has an HEVC codec pre-installed and if this was some licensing nonsense).

I cannot test my VM’s currently though as I’m changing things around.

This looks perfect and it should be working.

Can anyone else with Linux test this? Also, report your GPU make and model! (This may be required and important information.)

EDIT for why the GPU info may be important: On Windows, GPU video decode is standardized, on Mac OS as well, on Linux this isn’t as cut and dry (I’ve used Linux since the late 90’s), but there are standards. Sometimes things don’t work as it should though. The reason this may come in handy, is it’ll help us determine if the GPU has HEVC support, and if so, why did it stop working? Do other Chromium based browsers work with your display server/GPU driver combination? If so then Brave is certainly an issue then, but if other Chromium builds don’t, then something broke at the same time as the Brave update, making it a coincidence. (Which has happened to me countless times on Linux, since when I update Brave, I update the OS components at the same time, there’s where those coincidences come from.) I don’t run Linux as a host anymore so my troubleshooting will be limited, but I do understand the API’s used, like DXVA/DXVA2/D3D11 Video/D3D12 (it’s really only 2 standards, different versions) Video for Windows, VideoToolbox for Mac OS, but Linux is complicated here because Linux has the following API’s: VA-API, VDPAU, and V4L2 M2M.

VA-API is the one I’m going to be eyeballing, as Firefox and Chromium both use this one.

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Yes it works on Chrome (and Firefox)

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AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT

Chrome works fine

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OK, I have tried backing back several versions of Brave and it still doesn’t work so I suspect this is not related to a brave update. I’ll do some more digging…

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