# How activate vdpau in flashvideos?



## cabriofahrer (May 20, 2015)

I understand that it is possible to use the vdpau hardware acceleration of the video card with flashvideos, but how can this be achieved in FreeBSD? I assume that vdpau which is automatically enabled with some  ATI cards would work as well?


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## protocelt (May 22, 2015)

Unfortunately you can not use vdpau with flash videos under FreeBSD. IIRC, hardware acceleration was removed by Adobe at some point from the Linux flash plugin and so by extension FreeBSD as well(FreeBSD uses a Linux compatibility layer to run the Linux flash plugin as there is no native flash plugin for FreeBSD)


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## cabriofahrer (May 24, 2015)

Well, that is not good news. Why would they do that? And what about if you use html5 instead of flash? Would it be possible to use vdpau with that?


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## protocelt (May 25, 2015)

cabriofahrer said:


> Well, that is not good news. Why would they do that?


From what I gather, Adobe didn't believe the Linux graphics drivers were stable/reliable enough to continue support for it.



cabriofahrer said:


> And what about if you use html5 instead of flash? Would it be possible to use vdpau with that?


I'm not really sure, but I don't think so at this time. Full hardware acceleration is possible for www/chromium and www/firefox if using the right graphics hardware(Nvidia) by forcing it on though available flags and I use it without problems, however though Chromium says video acceleration is enabled, it doesn't actually seem to be the case. Firefox seems to be the same. I haven't looked further to be honest as I haven't had any problems with playing videos with either www/firefox or www/chromium.


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## cabriofahrer (May 27, 2015)

I use SeaMonkey, which is practically the same as Firefox. The processor usage while playing YouTube videos or internet radio, e.g. Big R Radio 80's Metal FM is constantly 100% on a 32-bit 1,6 GHz processor. But thanks to your answer I have just tried Chromium with an amazing result: Without any configuration on the browser, the processor usage suddenly ranges from 11 to 35% while listening to Big R Radio, similar while watching videos on YouTube, so great thing! I guess this is due to vdpau/HW acceleration involved? In my case ATI, not NVIDIA.

Which brings me to the next question: When using Spotify with wine, the processor usage is also constantly 100%. So is there a way of configuring the "Windows Flash player" inside WINE to use vdpau, too?


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