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Question

I'm running a fresh install of Xubuntu 12.04 and I'd like to know how can I activate my nVidia card's GPU acceleration inside the latest stable Chromium. I wanted to play an MP4 file without the CPU firing to 100%.

I've installed mplayer and vdpau (and they work fine), but so far I haven't been able to use them inside Chromium. A couple of years ago, I used gecko-mediaplayer but the plugin's been blacklisted...

Any ideas?

Here's the output of glxinfo | grep render:

direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GT 520M/PCIe/SSE2
    GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_compute_program5, GL_NV_conditional_render, 
    GL_NV_parameter_buffer_object2, GL_NV_path_rendering, 
    GL_NVX_conditional_render, GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info,

and here's the output of lspci | grep -i vga:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF119 [GeForce GT 520M] (rev a1)

Chromium is churning out a lot of warnings whenever I open the page, as you can see here and I've just found out a promising lead, lost in a sea of performance warnings:

NVIDIA: could not open the device file /dev/nvidia0 (Operation not permitted).

After adding the user to the video group, Chromium is now unable to play MP4's at all (yup, not even using the CPU). I got the same error messages as before, but a new one popped up as well:

[4296:4296:0827/100001:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(208)] Not implemented reached in void content::GpuVideoDecodeAccelerator::Initialize(media::VideoCodecProfile, IPC::Message*)**HW video decode acceleration not available**.

Accepted Answer

TL;DR: Unless you have tried everything below and now you get a black screen hitting this particular fixed bug, your problem should be solved by now. If you now get:

ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(208)] Not implemented reached in void content::GpuVideoDecodeAccelerator::Initialize(media::VideoCodecProfile, IPC::Message\*) HW video decode acceleration not available.

after trying everything below, then you should try starting Chrome/ium with --disable-gpu-sandbox or --blacklist-accelerated-compositing. If problems persists, revert all changes and report a bug detailing what is your problem, what have you tried, and all the data possible: about:gpu, about:version, the drivers you are using, kernel version, etc. For the ones that still want to test their luck, use the switch mentioned earlier, does that are having issues with AMD cards, the "Forcing Chrome/ium to use HWA" section works for you. Those using Nvidia privatives drivers or the xorg-ppa-edge, should test with Firefox and see if the issue happens there too.