Build with VA-API support for video encoding/decoding hardware acceleration?

[nekohayo]

Unless I'm mistaken, I think the flatpak version of jitsi's electron is not using hardware acceleration? Therefore it's making my laptop heat up needlessly, even compared to modern Firefoxes on Wayland? I'm not 110% sure but I think I've seen Firefox keep my Sandybridge CPU 10 degrees Celsius cooler than the flatpaked jitsi, in the same meeting session.

If so, see

• Set use_vaapi=true build flag electron/electron#18942
• Support video acceleration (VA-API) on Linux electron-userland/electron-builder#5788

Ideally, the same should be done with the Signal flatpak, but that'd probably be @bermeitinger-b

[bermeitinger-b]

It would be best to have hardware acceleration for video encoding and decoding.

For Signal, we can't do much directly because we're using the Electron version that is provided by Flathub and the prebuilt deb version from upstream Signal.
We're currently not building anything on "our own".

Also, I don't know which codec is used by Signal, but I somehow doubt that it's x264, so widespread hardware acceleration is not possible anyway.

[ananace]

I don't think there's much to be done here about hardware acceleration either, the Jitsi flatpak is also not doing any building either - it's just packaging the upstream binaries as they preferred.

For better comparison numbers though, I'd suggest comparing the Jitsi desktop app with a regular Chromium install - preferably of a similar version too. Firefox might be doing things differently than Electron could after all.