<![CDATA[H.264 hardware acceleration]]>Unlike other Chromium browsers, Opera doesn't support H.264 hardware acceleration out of the box. Instead it uses Window Media Foundation, which uses an extremely CPU-intensive H.264 software decoder.

Disabling this flag opera://flags/#enable-media-foundation-video-capture works around that issue. Opera now uses D3D11VideoDecoder instead, which is hardware-accelerated. You can verify that under opera://media-internals/ and opera://gpu

If you are on a platform which doesn't support VP9 hardware acceleration, but does support H.264, additionally installing https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/enhanced-h264ify/omkfmpieigblcllmkgbflkikinpkodlk will provide you with an option to switch to H.264 instead. This only works if you enable H.264 hardware acceleration beforehand. You will now enjoy hardware accelerated video decoding everywhere.

Note: VP9 hardware acceleration will work in Opera by default, as it's using the VpxVideoDecoder by default, just H.264 is affected by this issue.

]]>https://forums.opera.com/topic/52542/h-264-hardware-accelerationRSS for NodeThu, 11 Jun 2026 14:35:12 GMTThu, 11 Nov 2021 21:08:50 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to H.264 hardware acceleration on Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:50:02 GMT]]>@jtsnet Here Opera uses hardware acceleration on VP9 too.

Both in H264 and in VP9 the video decoder is D3D11videodecoder or something like that.

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/267060https://forums.opera.com/post/267060Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:50:02 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to H.264 hardware acceleration on Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:40:03 GMT]]>@leocg said in H.264 hardware acceleration:

@jtsnet Here I have that flag enabled by default and Opera uses hardware acceleration on H264 videos.

What is the kVideoDecoderName? It all depends on the GPU being used. On my platform (Windows 10, Intel Skylake) every Chromium-based browser including Microsoft Edge accelerates H.264, while Opera does not by default. Therefore the workaround.

And if VpxVideoDecoder is being used, the hardware acceleration is not being used.

That's correct VpxVideoDecoder ist the default, as Opera doesn't seem to use Windows Media Foundation for VP9. That software decoder is still much faster than the H.264 software decoder built into WMF and with VP9 HW acceleration available another accelerated decoder will be used just as in other Chromium browsers.

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/267059https://forums.opera.com/post/267059Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:40:03 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to H.264 hardware acceleration on Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:22:04 GMT]]>@jtsnet Here I have that flag enabled by default and Opera uses hardware acceleration on H264 videos.

And if VpxVideoDecoder is being used, the hardware acceleration is not being used.

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/267057https://forums.opera.com/post/267057Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:22:04 GMT