Let’s check that hardware acceleration is working with AV1 and VP9 encoded videos. It’s easy to verify this using the intel_gpu_top utility which is found in the intel-gpu-tools package.
In Ubuntu, it’s installed in the usual way i.e.
$ sudo apt install intel-gpu-tools
The utility needs elevated permissions to run, so it’s launched with the command $ sudo intel_gpu_tools
With no video playing, the Video Engine shows 0% busy.
AV1
Here’s a snapshot of an AV1 encoded 4K video being played with mpv.
Playback is silky smooth on the FIREBAT.
And intel-gpu-top reports that the Video Engine is being used. This means that we’re playing the video with hardware acceleration, offloading playback to the onboard GPU.
VP9
Here we’re playing a VP9 encoded video with mpv.
Again playback is silky smooth courtesy of hardware acceleration.
So both AV1 and VP9 hardware encoding work out of the box with the FIREBAT under Ubuntu 23.10. No messing around with drivers is needed.
We also tested HEVC 10 bit and AVC. The FIREBAT had no issues there either.
Watching videos with Firefox also sees the benefits of video hardware acceleration out of the box.
Next page: Page 3 – Music Playback
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Video Drivers
Page 2 – Video Playback
Page 3 – Music Playback
Complete list of articles in this series:
| FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Testing the power consumption |
| Part 4 | Multimedia: Watching videos and listening to music |
| Part 5 | How does the FIREBAT fare as a gaming PC? |
| Part 6 | Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 |
| Part 7 | Installing and Configuring EndeavourOS, an Arch-based distro |
| Part 8 | Installing and Configuring Rhino Linux, a rolling release Ubuntu-based distro |
| Part 9 | VirtualBox performance on the FIREBAT |