Hardware accelerated video decoding not working on Linux again.

[Debian_SuperUser]

This is such an excruciating problem and it's making me absolutely mad. Lately, I have been kind of amazed in how good Librewolf (hence Firefox) is performing so good on YouTube. All the performance problems I had regarding YouTube were gone on Librewolf. I didn't make the switch yet because I have data on Chromium that I am using. I even tried installing Google Chrome and that didn't seem any faster, until I pulled up intel_gpu_top and realized that hardware accelerated video decoding is not working again! Idk from how much long time I have been using CPU rendering. I swear it was working before and that's why I left it. And no, it's not that AV1 videos are running on CPU because I have no hardware support. I already force AV1 videos to use VP9 using h264ify-enhanced extension, and the video I tested to see if hardware video decoding is working is in native VP9.

Wtf happened, when it was working before? An update broke it? Why is such an important thing so broken on the Linux branch of Chromium? I am using these Chromium flags that worked before -
--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blacklist --enable-zero-copy
I tried these as well which ChatGPT suggested -
--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder
--ignore-gpu-blocklist
--use-gl=desktop
--enable-zero-copy
--enable-gpu-rasterization

They don't work anymore. It's so frustrating. I have Intel integrated graphics (Gen9). Isn't VA-API that I am looking for? All the packages of that are installed. In between I think I installed some other packages related to intel graphics that I installed, but I don't think that they should have an impact, right? If somebody with an Intel GPU is running Chromium with video decoding working, please share your flags.

edit - I am running Arch.

 

[Debian_SuperUser]

Okay, I got it working. It's written here - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/docs/gpu/vaapi.md

Either use the OpenGL or Vulkan flags given at the bottom.

But still though, if I compare YouTube on Chromium vs Librewolf, Librewolf feels so much smoother. Shorts scrool smoother and chats on Livestream also go smooth. Why is this a problem on Chromium only? I am definitely switching to LibreWolf.