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So I noticed that the fans of my Dell XPS 9560 kick in whenever I'm watching YouTube. I looked at CPU usage with top and powertop and 'Web Content' uses 50-90% of CPU. I googled a ton and it appears that Firefox just does not use hardware acceleration on Linux. So I followed every guide out there, changed every about:config line that is spoken of but the CPU usage is still the same. This is really annoying to me as I watch a lot of YT and my laptop is pretty powerful so this should not be the case. I tried both the Intel and Nvidia GPU but that is not the issue. Has somebody here found a solution?

I really searched all of AU and google but none of the solutions so far work.

Specs:

  • Intel i7-7700HQ
  • 16 GB DDR4 -2400MHz

Cheers

Nicolas Grossen
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  • Have you tried installing the latest Nvidia drivers? https://askubuntu.com/questions/851069/latest-nvidia-driver-on-ubuntu-16-04 – Katu Apr 05 '18 at 08:51
  • I have not, but I use prime to select between GPU's, and I am only using the Intel GPU for the moment. I believe I have 390 installed. But when I googled the issue it was pretty clear that browsers somehow have a problem with hardware acceleration on Linux... – Nicolas Grossen Apr 05 '18 at 09:15

2 Answers2

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Same here, Firefox eats a lot of CPU(>100%) when playing Youtube videos. One tweak is to enter about:config in address bar, then search for below flag and make it true.

media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled

After that, the cpu usages becomes 20-40% which is kind of normal and on par with Chromium.

You could possibly get more juice after using this h264ify addon.

LeOn - Han Li
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I have found this: https://www.pcsuggest.com/chromium-hardware-accelerated-video-decoding-linux/

it appears to work, CPU usage is very low with this ppa. But the downside is the process of installing the API's. I went through every step on this page: https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-beta

but it still does not work. I am done for today, maybe I'll try to figure out why it does not work later.

EDIT: simply rebooting worked!!

EDIT2: but the CPU usage is high again :(

FINAL EDIT: You have to enable gpu blacklist flag, and then everything works :)

Nicolas Grossen
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