I am not gonna lie... Hardware video acceleration on Linux has traumatized me so much. I have spend soooooo much time over the years dealing with this shit. I has gotten better, i admit. But before you had to make sure all the stars aligned perfectly to make this shit work properly. Hell, even last week i found out that hardware video acceleration did not seem to work on twitch.tv on my firefox browser. After 2 days of reinstalling my Linux distro, drivers, many different ways of running firefox such as the rpm version, flatpak etc. I found out opensuse removed the mesa drivers that included the codecs i needed... i found out about it through some old reddit post comment with 2 upvotes... Even now i am having issues with running sunshine streaming. And it drives me insane because it SHOULD work. But it doesn't. It could be the flatpak not having correct access. It could be the driver. It could be wayland. I don't even know anymore... it just refuses to find available codecs. Then i tried steam remote play instead. And it streams... a black screen with only my cursor showing.

I don't know anymore. I don't care anymore.

Oh another fun one is geforce now. On Linux if you use hardware acceleration, a certain part of the grey/black color spectrum is missing from the video stream. So games are quite darker and it makes games like dead by daylight completely unplayable as most dark spots are completely black. If you run it without hardware acceleration it works fine... but then you get very bad lag, stuttering and slowmotion at higher bitrate. So that is also unplayable.

Hardware video acceleration on Linux is a disaster and really deserves more attention. Every now and then it works and then something updates and everything is broken again. I currently just dual boot because i use sunshine and geforce now a lot.

Sorry for the long rant. I didn't know i typed this much. But it honestly really deserves some attention as it can really mess up the users experience. Often without their knowledge.

I knew that there existed different types of hardware video encoders, but I always thought that it would get installed together with your gpu drivers. Thanks will check it out!

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don't have any AMD powered on to verify)

One of my biggest pet peeves with Linux by far. Usually my use of Linux is generally just parsec and that's it. But I can't ever select the right driver, and then I forget, idk it's a whole thing and I just wish it was baked in and easy, but then again it is linux

Noting, this PSA is absolutely useful for older components - especially Intel, but anyone using something newer than Skylake (circa 2015) is probably already set up with intel-media-driver or the nv/amd video driver.

nvtop is a useful tool to monitor GPU activity and the decoder in use when a video plays, if you're unsure