Hardware video decode on Orange Pi 5 / RK3588 with Firefox — working solution
If you have an Orange Pi 5, Orange Pi 5 Plus, Rock 5B or any board with a Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S SoC and Firefox is not using hardware video decode (high CPU on 4K video… (leer más)
If you have an Orange Pi 5, Orange Pi 5 Plus, Rock 5B or any board with a Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S SoC and Firefox is not using hardware video decode (high CPU on 4K video, stuttering), here is a working solution.
The RK3588 has a VPU capable of decoding H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 up to 8K, but there is no vendor VA-API driver for it. I wrote one:
https://github.com/woodyst/rockchip-vaapi
It bridges libva (VA-API) to librockchip-mpp, the official Rockchip hardware codec library. Once installed, Firefox uses the VPU for all video decode.
Supported codecs: H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1 (including 10-bit HDR content) Tested on: Orange Pi 5 Plus with Ubuntu/Debian aarch64, Firefox 128+
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/woodyst/rockchip-vaapi.git cd rockchip-vaapi make && sudo make install
Then set these environment variables before launching Firefox:
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=rockchip LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/dri MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 # if using Wayland
Full instructions and Firefox about:config settings in the README.
Hope this helps anyone hitting the same issue.