[tagrun]

> They have perfectly great existing hardware decoder offloading APIs via the various OS' native APIs for videos

One vendor specific API, not "various OS' native APIs".

Firefox currently supports hardware video decoding with Intel's vendor specific VA-API only on Linux, which is not supported by NVIDIA. (A third-party VA-API to NVDEC translation layer for Linux does exist on GitHub, nvidia-vaapi-driver, but it's not yet reliable as the officially supported VDPAU or NVDEC, and is not included in official linux package repositories.)

Intel has VA-API, AMD has AMF, and NVIDIA has VDPAU which is being replaced by NVDEC/NVENC.

The idea behind Vulkan Video Extensions is to have a vendor independent and cross-platform video API.

[mikepavone]

> No, Firefox currently supports hardware video decoding with Intel's vendor specific VA-API only, which is not supported by NVIDIA.

Intel is behind VA-API originally, but I don't think it's fair to say it's a vendor specific API anymore. It's supported by the open source drivers for GPUs from all 3 vendors. It's just that the open source drivers for Nvidia cards are not very practical and the proprietary drivers only support vdpau and nvdec/nvenc

[tagrun]

You can make the same argument for VDPAU. AMD officially supports it, and there is an unofficial translation layer with limited capabilities for some Intel GPUs. Is VDPAU not a vendor specific API anymore then?

Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have their own vendor-specific video APIs, and even when they provide official support for the API of another vendor, it tends to expose a limited subset of the full functionality (like the list of available codecs and encoding features).

You are free to call these vendor specific APIs for what they are or something else, but the reality has been that there is no single video API officially supported by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. This changed with Vulkan Video.

But Vulkan Video isn't just about desktop: mobile devices, Raspberry Pi, etc. are expected to get on board with it eventually, just like they did with Vulkan.

> It's supported by the open source drivers for GPUs from all 3 vendors.

Which 3 vendors are you referring to? Intel, AMD, and who?

> It's just that the open source drivers for Nvidia cards are not very practical and the proprietary drivers only support vdpau and nvdec/nvenc

Why are you bringing up open source drivers, and what is not practical? Both official open source drivers (open-gpu-kernel-module) and unofficial open source drivers (nouveau, through binary firmware) support VDPAU. However, NVIDIA's drivers (open source or binary) does not support VA-API.

[account42]

Right, this is yet another instance of Nvidia not wanting to play nice with the other kids.

[kllrnohj]

> One vendor specific API, not "various OS' native APIs".

Incorrect. Firefox uses Windows Media Foundation, which is cross-vendor, on Windows. It uses MediaCodec on Android which is again cross-vendor. Presumably it uses whatever iOS' equivalent is as well.

It only uses VA-API on a single OS, Linux, and that's probably more a reflection on the media qualities (or lack thereof) of Linux as a whole. Maybe Vulkan video extensions will be the savior on Linux. Or maybe it won't because it won't be anyone's focus of investment since it's largely a Linux-only problem in the first place.

[tagrun]

What is "incorrect"? The full sentence that you conveniently chose to cut in the middle before quoting (apparently to fit into some pessimistic forecast about the significance of Linux desktop) reads

> Firefox currently supports hardware video decoding with Intel's vendor specific VA-API only on Linux, which is not supported by NVIDIA.

(emphasis added)

You further wrote:

> Firefox uses Windows Media Foundation, which is cross-vendor, on Windows. It uses MediaCodec on Android which is again cross-vendor.

And? None of those APIs are cross-platform. Vulkan Video will eventually allow developers (including Firefox developers) to write a single code path for video to cover a wide range of platforms and vendors (likely with the exception of walled gardens like Apple-land, although someone might find a way to support like via a wrapper like MoltenVk for Vulkan).

[Dalewyn]

I'm always annoyed how any Linux media player or encoder needs to bring its own entire media operating system, down to each individual nut and bolt.

On Windows there's Windows Media Foundation and DirectShow that centrally manage everything and also support the "individual nut and bolt" approach. Android has its own central thing (MediaCodec?) that must be used. MacOS and iOS presumably have their own central manager (Quicktime?) too.

But Linux? It doesn't serve as an operating system for media. It's tremendously inconvenient as an admin/user rather than an evangelist.

[vetinari]

AMD AMF is not open-source; only the SDK part of it is. The runtime part is closed, bundled with the "pro" drivers.

It is also intended as a multi-platform abstraction.

This makes it a no-go as a platform API. The open drivers for AMD use VA-API.