Success! Was: Testing the new i915 driver (HD Graphics 4400)

[Arto Pekkanen]

To get VAAPI acceleration for video, you should do as follows:
- enable the VAAPI option for ports multimedia/ffmpeg and multimedia/mpv
- build and install the aforementioned ports
- edit file ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf, add the following lines:
vo=vaapi
hwdec=vaapi
- use mpv to play video files, preferably full HD

The same applies to other players too.

Sorry for HTML reply, my phone does not allow plain text.


Arto Pekkanen, ksym at IRCnet

Juan Ramón Molina Menor <listjm at club.fr> wrote:

>Le 11/10/2015 20:01, Arto Pekkanen a écrit :
>> Would you like to elaborate on this "High CPU usage when playing videos"? Did you mean "high CPU usage when compared to previous driver"? Or what are the exact metrics for this statement?
>Hi, sorry for not replying earlier. I have no metrics to compare the 
>performance, nor I know how to implement them. In a recent message from 
>yourself, you consider CPU usage around 30-60% with 1080p full HD video 
>as acceptable limits. In fact, I’m seeing with top around 25% on a 
>i3-4030, so a full CPU thread, when playing a full-screen YouTube HD 
>video loop.
>
>> I am a multi-system power user, and I can tell you that in a vanilla Debian 8.0 installation with Intel driver, on my Thinkpad T430, Chromium eats 20%+ CPU when playing HD videos from Youtube. Also, to get rid of video tearing issues, one need to use x11-wm/compton to do composition in both FreeBSD and Debian (or any other Linuxen). The compositor causes further +20-40% CPU usage per OpenGL/GLX process (guaranteed, tested, no workaround). The compositor induced per process overhead could be done away by tweaking driver options, compositor configuration etc. but it requires a lot of experimentation (and frankly, most people just give up at this point and learn to live with either high CPU usage or video tearing). In general, most systems using X.org/X11 is really, really awful at video playback when compared to Windows or OS X. This is why there are video acceleration interfaces, such as Intel VAAPI or nVidia VDPAU that negate the CPU overhead and eliminate tearing.
>I’m not using a compositor.
>
>> Plese try VAAPI. You must compile in the VAAPI support in both the player and the AV codec framework. If you VAAPI helped with the high CPU usage, a report would be appreciated.
>I’ve made some research and I’ve not been able to find how I could test 
>this support. I’m using vimb as web browser.
>
>Best regards,
>Juan