Hello people,
I’m in a rabbit hole, trying to get my some useful battery endurance while watching (YouTube) Videos. I read through many threads here in the forum and many articles on ArchWiki. I managed to enable hardware accelerated video decoding, also in Firefox (my primary web browser).
Here are my results:
Used Hardware:
- Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition
- Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake i5-1240P
- 32GB DDR4 3200
- 500GB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe
- Intel WiFi 6E AX210
- no HDMI card plugged in
- no peripheral devices connected
Operation System Setup:
- ArchLinux with kernel version 6.2.10
- Xorg as display server
- i3wm as window manager
- PipeWire
Relevant Services:
- TLP with default configuration
- auto cpu-freq
Video Acceleration Related:
- installed
intel-media-driver
package -
vainfo
report includes support H264 and V9 hardware en-/decoding - basically everything the ArchWiki is recommending is working out of the box for me
Runtime Software:
- Firefox version 112.0 with settings in
about:config
optionmedia.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled
astrue
- mpv version 0.35.1
- PowerTOP version 2.15
- yt-dlp version 2023.03.04
- intel-gpu-tools version 1.27
- Chromium version 112.0.5615.49 without any configuration
I ran all scenarios using a clean started system, just opening a terminal and depending on the scenario the respective browser or video player.
Display brightness on moderate level.
Power supply from battery.
Video is played on YouTube or downloaded from it.
Video resolution is constantly fixed to 1080p (has an impact).
Window playing the video is ~80% of the screen (has an impact).
I wait for about a minute to let the system settle on a more stable power consumption for each scenario.
Idle system with graphical environment and terminal running powertop and Intel GPU top:
~5W power consumption
GPU video NOT active
Firefox:
~10W power consumption
GPU video active
Chromium:
~11W power consumption
GPU video NOT active
MPV with already downloaded video (mpv —hwcodec=auto <local_file_path>
):
~9W power consumption
GPU video active
MPV with piped active download (yt-dlp —format-sort “res:1080” <URL> —output - | mpv - —hwcodec=auto
):
~9W
GPU video active
Same Video in Firefox with 4K resolution:
~11W
GPU video active
The laptop gets noticeably warm on my lap. Though the fan stays pretty silent when using hardware supported video decoding. Looking also into ‘htop’, the CPU is actually pretty idle. Though the Firefox process is still causing much more load when switching between video pause or playing.
I must admit I’m not too happy with the results. Especially when I see the MacBook M1 of my wife in comparison.
Would be amazing if you could share your results, experience and maybe tips how to improve more.
Thank you very much everyone!