NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping Google bring Vulkan Video accelerated GPU video decoding to the Chrome/Chromium web browser.
The Chrome/Chromium web browser on Linux has mostly been centered around the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for GPU-accelerated video decoding. But the NVIDIA Linux official driver doesn’t natively support VA-API and thus requires alternatives like this NVIDIA VA-API driver built atop the NVDEC interface. But it looks like NVIDIA is now willing to commit resources to help Chrome/Chromium support Vulkan Video for a better cross-vendor and cross-platform video acceleration approach.
Since Feburary 2024 has been this Chromium feature request seeking Vulkan Video decode support by Chrome/Chromium. There hasn’t been much activity until the past week when a NVIDIA engineer stepped up offering to help port Vulkan Video to Chrome’s Codec 2.0 APIs interface.
A Google engineer responded that they don’t have any current plans for Vulkan Video decoding but they wouldn’t be opposed to a “community” contribution of it. A follow-up comment also mentioned that NVIDIA customers are interested in Vulkan Video to help in the video acceleration experience, especially for ARM64 Linux desktops. Supporting Vulkan Video would be great across hardware/drivers and operating systems.
Another comment on that ticket in the past week reaffirmed NVIDIA’s interest in helping collaborate on Vulkan Video support in Chrome. But with some pending technical questions for going about the implementation.
Hopefully this will work out and NVIDIA will be able to help in providing Vulkan Video decoding support for the Google Chrome/Chromium browser at least on Linux.
