[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#793815: chromium: Enable accelerated video decoding

[Tony Houghton]

Package: chromium
Version: 44.0.2403.107-1
Severity: wishlist

By default Chromium doesn't support accelerated video decoding on
desktop Linux, but with a few tweaks to the source etc it can easily be
enabled due to the support in ChromeOS (using VAAPI). I think the
situation is that upstream just don't have anyone prepared to maintain
it properly in non-ChromeOS Linux at the moment, and earlier issues
about it being unstable in Linux are obsolete.

IMO chromium is severely hampered without this feature. It needs quite a
modern/high-end CPU to be able to play HD at full speed, and even if you
have one it can cause unwanted fan noise.

There is an Ubuntu PPA for Chromium Beta which has VAAPI enabled at
<https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-beta>. I've
tried using it to watch a few youtube videos on a few machines
(including using the VDPAU backend for VAAPI with an AMD GPU) and it
worked well on all of them.

The patches the PPA adds to the source look quite simple, just changing
a few #ifs to enable the code in other versions of Linux besides
ChromeOS, and fixing the way the va library is opened (upstream were
depending on hardcoded paths in ChromeOS).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.0.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages chromium depends on:
ii  libasound2           1.0.29-1
ii  libatk1.0-0          2.16.0-2
ii  libc6                2.19-19
ii  libcairo2            1.14.2-2
ii  libcups2             2.0.3-6
ii  libdbus-1-3          1.8.18-1
ii  libexpat1            2.1.0-6+b3
ii  libfontconfig1       2.11.0-6.3
ii  libfreetype6         2.5.2-4
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0   2.31.4-2
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.44.1-1.1
ii  libgnome-keyring0    3.12.0-1+b1
ii  libgtk2.0-0          2.24.28-1
ii  libharfbuzz0b        0.9.41-1
ii  libjpeg62-turbo      1:1.4.0-7
ii  libnspr4             2:4.10.8-2
ii  libnss3              2:3.19.2-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0       1.36.8-3
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0  1.36.8-3
ii  libpci3              1:3.2.1-3
ii  libspeechd2          0.8-7
ii  libspeex1            1.2~rc1.2-1
ii  libsrtp0             1.4.5~20130609~dfsg-1.1
ii  libstdc++6           5.1.1-14
ii  libx11-6             2:1.6.3-1
ii  libxcomposite1       1:0.4.4-1
ii  libxcursor1          1:1.1.14-1+b1
ii  libxdamage1          1:1.1.4-2+b1
ii  libxext6             2:1.3.3-1
ii  libxfixes3           1:5.0.1-2+b2
ii  libxi6               2:1.7.4-1+b2
ii  libxml2              2.9.1+dfsg1-5
ii  libxrandr2           2:1.4.2-1+b1
ii  libxrender1          1:0.9.8-1+b1
ii  libxslt1.1           1.1.28-2+b2
ii  libxss1              1:1.2.2-1
ii  libxtst6             2:1.2.2-1+b1
ii  x11-utils            7.7+3
ii  xdg-utils            1.1.0~rc1+git20111210-7.4

chromium recommends no packages.

Versions of packages chromium suggests:
pn  chromium-l10n  <none>

-- no debconf information