Anticipated for the April release of the Mozilla Firefox 137 web browser is finally supporting HEVC (H.265) video playback in an accelerated manner using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).

Merged today to the Firefox code set to become Firefox 137 is the enabling of HEVC accelerated playback using the VA-API driver, which in turn can be used by the Mesa Gallium3D VA state tracker and other Linux GPU drivers as well as [1]the NVIDIA binary GPU driver when using an additional layer .

For the past ten months has been [2]this support request to enable HEVC via the VA-API interface on Linux. This follows Mozilla having enabled accelerated HEVC playback under Microsoft Windows back with Firefox 120 using the Media Foundation Transform "MFT" library.

As of today all the HEVC VA-API patches for Firefox have been merged and set to be part of Firefox 137 in early April barring any last minute issues from being reported.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver-0.0.11

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894818