Google is preparing a field trial with the Chrome web browser of accelerated video decoding under Wayland/Linux as a step toward rolling it out by default for a better video playback experience on the Linux desktop with Wayland-based environments.

On Friday a field trial testing configuration was [1]merged for AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL. This field trial is in reference to [2]this bug report for enabling video decode acceleration on Linux/Wayland. The bug report was originally opened in 2022 by an Intel engineer for exposing VDAVideoDecoderor and VAAPIVideDecoder.

The field trial is enabling the AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL and AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL features. Users can already manually enable them via --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL switches or via chrome://flags while this field trial is about testing it on users in hopes of enabling them by default in a future Chrome/Chromium web browser release.

Here's to hoping the AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL field trial goes well and Google Chrome/Chromium enable GPU accelerated video decoding by default under Wayland soon.



[1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6867416

[2] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40225939