Raspberry Pi 5 missing video decode hardware acceleration in chromium

[otte]

Greetings,

 

I installed Armbian Noble with gnome desktop, specifically "Armbian_26.2.1_Rpi4b_noble_current_6.18.9_gnome_desktop.img" on a Raspberry Pi 5. Updated system and installed chrome since I need to play some media from inside chromium browser. However, I checked to see that hardware accelerated video decode is not actually supported within Armbian currently.

Previously I had official Raspberry Pi OS installed when I first had a look at the device and there it was enabled. It's kind of a minor thing but I've used different hardware with Armbian before and it would make things a lot easier for me if I can keep using Armbian on Raspberry Pi 5 as well.

Only hint I've found on forum so far was a post from 2024 but it seemed to affect hardware acceleration in system overall and was a known issue, so I believe this is a new topic.

Other thing I still tried was to go with a rolling release instead of Standard support, in this case "Armbian_26.2.0-trunk.679_Rpi4b_noble_current_6.18.20_gnome_desktop.img" but same issue.

 

Any ideas on what can be done here, perhaps a setting or package I might have missed?

[geoW]

How to Change hardware configuration?

Use /boot/firmware/config.txt to configure hardware settings. This is the official Raspberry Pi method.

From https://www.armbian.com/rpi4b/

I assume same for your gpu settings.

[LivingLinux]

It will only work for h265, as that is the only hardware decoder available in the Pi 5. So it won't help you with for instance YouTube, as they use VP9 and AV1 (or you can force h264 with a browser plugin).

 

You can try Firefox.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1833354

 

Or change some of the flags in Chromium, but it feels as if they keep changing, so you might find other suggested flags all over the internet.

 

You can set the mentioned flags in: chrome://flags/

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244031