Friends of energy efficiency - the Light Video 0.1.0 #Flathub update is out, build with #gtk4 4.14 and #GStreamer 1.24.1.
This should be the first app targeting the #linux / FDO desktop enabling Wayland video offloading (think zero-copy playback) by default. In many cases (actually more than I expected) this can improve battery lifetime - and on low-end devices even playback performance - significantly.
This is kinda a technology preview in order to see if we can ship features like this enabled by default in a lot more apps in the ecosystem.
Thus I'd be very super happy if you'll try it on lots of hardware - be Intel/AMD laptops or ARM64 devices (with V4L2 stateless decoders, such as most #LinuxMobile devices).
Chances that you really hit a zero-copy path are highest with a recent #Wayland compositor - i.e. if you are using #GNOME46, #kde6 or a recent version of #sway.
Note that there are still a number of limitations to offloading to KMS/display controllers. In these cases Livi should fall back just fine and will just be less efficient.
I hope we can lift them step by step. A few of them being:
- only hardware decoded video, not sw decoded
- only VA-API or V4L2-stateless, no V4L2-stateful or Vulkan yet (but at least the later should fall in place naturally)
- depending on the compositor and hw: only if the display dimensions match the video, e.g. 16:9
@rmader Gnome really needs a video player since Totem is deprecated. Could this be its successor?
@user8e8f87c livi is very minimalistic in its approach and mainly targets mobile. There are a few others that are maybe more feature complete - or we find some hero to port Totem to GTK4 and do some modenizations.
@rmader @user8e8f87c I'm also using livi on TV, tablet and laptpop 😃
On Livi 0.1.0 flatpak, when I try to do it, I get an error: Error from element /GstPlayBin3:playbin3/GstURIDecodeBin3:uridecodebin3/GstDecodebin3:decodebin3-0: Your GStreamer installation is missing a plug-in.
Things I've checked and tried: Checked gstreamer is installed in my system along with the decodebin which is on the package gst-base.
Install GStreamer on flatpak.
Thanks a lot!
Instead of pasting you can give the URL on the command line, this might also give some more information about the error.
The gst plugins need to be part of the flatpak. So likely it misses a plugin for the video format. A bug at https://github.com/flathub/org.sigxcpu.Livi with the URL would be good.
