Re: Can't view videos in firefox: VA-API test failed

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

Stefan Monnier wrote: 
> Whenever I try to view videos in Firefox in my trusty Thinkpad T61,
> Firefox just eats up the CPU but doesn't actually show the video.
> 
> At startup I get the following message:
> 
>     [GFX1-]: vaapitest: VA-API test failed: failed to initialise VAAPI connection.
...
 
> I understand that my machine is fairly old, but it used to be able to
> play youtube videos just fine without eating all my CPU time (i.e. using
> hardware video decoding from its GM965/GL960 Intel integrated graphcs).
> 
> Any idea what might be going on?  Any hint how I could diagnose the problem?


This should be the Intel 4500 integrated gpu, which is part of
the i915/i965 family. It needs:

- an intel kernel module
- X11 running the intel video driver
- libva-drm2
- libva-x11-2
- libva2
- i965-va-driver

It will support MPEG2 accelerated decoding but not H264, H265 or
any of the newer codecs -- and Youtube may not be supplying old
codecs these days.

-dsr-