[Chromium] Videos and GIFs are garbled up

[Sajjad Kabir Joy]

I am running Chromium Version 73.0.3683.75 (Developer Build) built on Debian buster/sid, running on Debian 10.0 (64-bit). Everything works just fine, except videos and GIFs ESPECIALLY in Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) look like this: https://flic.kr/p/2gwg6Q5

The shapes move, and there's sound, but they look like they'd been taken with thermal camera. I enabled and disabled chrome://flags options, reset them to defaults, and nothing worked. This problem is most commonly seen in Facebook, but one or two times, I saw it on YouTube as well. I should point out that Facebook videos had been problematic even on prior versions of Chrome (but at that time, the video simply wouldn't play, not like this). Also, I tested Chrome from Google (which is version 75.*) and the problem wasn't present there.

Given the odd nature of the problem, I couldn't really figure out where exactly I should post about it, so I decided to post here. Any advice in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Does this still happen with a fresh profile?

What is your video hardware & drivers?

[Wheelerof4te]

You posted it in the right area. Chromium is a desktop application and your problem is most likely related to video drivers. I happen to remember you're using AMD card? Which kernel driver are you using, amdgpu or radeon? Install inxi and post the output of:

Code: Select all

inxi -G

as a normal user.

Also off-topic, but you seem to be Vincent Law fanboy. He's a really cool guy, but I wouldn't wanna be around him, you know?

[Sajjad Kabir Joy]

Does this still happen with a fresh profile?

What is your video hardware & drivers?

Yes, it happens with a fresh profile as well.

[Sajjad Kabir Joy]

You posted it in the right area. Chromium is a desktop application and your problem is most likely related to video drivers. I happen to remember you're using AMD card? Which kernel driver are you using, amdgpu or radeon? Install inxi and post the output of:

Code: Select all

inxi -G

as a normal user.

Also off-topic, but you seem to be Vincent Law fanboy. He's a really cool guy, but I wouldn't wanna be around him, you know?

That's correct! I think we spoke previously on the using AMDGPU kernel driver for Kaveri thread (which I am using successfully as of now)? Here's the output of inxi -G:

Graphics: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Kaveri [Radeon R7 Graphics] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.4 driver: amdgpu,ati unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa resolution: 1360x768~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0 4.19.0-5-amd64 LLVM 8.0.1) v: 4.5 Mesa 19.1.1

P. S. Here are some of the things I noticed after creating this thread:

1. The problem disappears in version 73 when I disable hardware acceleration.
2. I installed 75.0.3770.90 from Unstable and the problem isn't present (same as Google Chrome 75*). But when I force enable GPU features such as rasterization in chrome://flags, the problem reappears. I can live with that; whatever acceleration "Use hardware acceleration when available" gives me is good enough. I mean something is better than nothing.

And yes, I am a Vincent Law fanboy! To be precise, a big fan of Ergo Proxy as a whole. And no... wouldn't wanna be near him, either, especially you know when

[Wheelerof4te]

OpenGL: renderer: AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0 4.19.0-5-amd64 LLVM 8.0.1) v: 4.5 Mesa 19.1.1

Debian 10 is using Mesa 18.3. That is enough to run your card with satisfying performance.
How did you install version 19.1? Did you have the same problem while you were using Debian's version?

2. I installed 75.0.3770.90 from Unstable and the problem isn't present

There are lots of problems in v73, I don't know why they aren't upgrading chromium. Buster is stable, so the security team should push an upgrade soon. Whenever they feel like it, though. Can't really demand anything from a volunteer community.
But it appears your problem comes from enabling hardware acceleration, which is indeed buggy and that's one of the reasons why it's disabled by default in Linux.

[Sajjad Kabir Joy]

Debian 10 is using Mesa 18.3. That is enough to run your card with satisfying performance.
How did you install version 19.1? Did you have the same problem while you were using Debian's version?

Yes, the video playback was the same with 18.3. Not only that, OpenCL didn't work with this version, either, so I installed 19.1 from Experimental. As far as hardware-decoded video playback on MPV and using OpenCL with GIMP are concerned, it works flawlessly, despite the experimental status of these packages.

But it appears your problem comes from enabling hardware acceleration, which is indeed buggy and that's one of the reasons why it's disabled by default in Linux.

Yeah, and from what I could dig, Radeon GPUs are even less supported by Chromium in GNU/Linux than Intel GPUs. There is apparently some sort of bug that's preventing the migration to 75 on Stable, and I hope it will be resolved soon. But frankly, this package from Unstable seems smoother than 73. And as far as I remember, the option to "Use hardware acceleration when available" in settings menu (not the ones under chrome://flags) was by default turned on, in all versions I used of either Chromium or Google Chrome.

[Wheelerof4te]

As far as hardware-decoded video playback on MPV and using OpenCL with GIMP are concerned, it works flawlessly, despite the experimental status of these packages.

Are you sure OpenCL is working? OpenCL is not part of open-source amdgpu driver, but is is available in AMDGPU-PRO (currently only for Ubuntu and RH/Centos). Maybe you meant OpenGL?
I've also read that hardware accelerated video decode doesn't work on SI/CIK cards running amdgpu driver (because it is considered experimental on those cards). However, radeon driver should offer working hardware accelerated video decode on those cards. So, if you are not using your card for heavy gaming (even then, amdgpu is only a must for vulkan support), switch to using radeon driver.
See if there are problems while running radeon.

[Sajjad Kabir Joy]

Are you sure OpenCL is working? OpenCL is not part of open-source amdgpu driver, but is is available in AMDGPU-PRO (currently only for Ubuntu and RH/Centos). Maybe you meant OpenGL?

Sorry for my delay, I'd been quite caught up. Yes. I'm sure. Mesa 18.* had trouble with both OpenCL (simply didn't work; clinfo, GIMP and LibreOffice would refuse to start with OpenCL turned on) and hardware video decoding (the first file playback worked, but going the second file, it sometimes crashed), but in Mesa 19.* both are working flawlessly. As proof of success, see the output of clinfo!
$ clinfo
Number of platforms 1
Platform Name Clover
Platform Vendor Mesa
Platform Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 19.1.2
Platform Profile FULL_PROFILE
Platform Extensions cl_khr_icd
Platform Extensions function suffix MESA

Platform Name Clover
Number of devices 1
Device Name AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0, 4.19.0-5-amd64, LLVM 8.0.1)
Device Vendor AMD
Device Vendor ID 0x1002
Device Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 19.1.2
Driver Version 19.1.2
Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.1
Device Type GPU
Device Profile FULL_PROFILE
Device Available Yes
Compiler Available Yes
Max compute units 6
Max clock frequency 720MHz
Max work item dimensions 3
Max work item sizes 256x256x256
Max work group size 256
Preferred work group size multiple 64
Preferred / native vector sizes
char 16 / 16
short 8 / 8
int 4 / 4
long 2 / 2
half 8 / 8 (cl_khr_fp16)
float 4 / 4
double 2 / 2 (cl_khr_fp64)
Half-precision Floating-point support (cl_khr_fp16)
Denormals No
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero No
Round to infinity No
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add No
Support is emulated in software No
Single-precision Floating-point support (core)
Denormals No
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero No
Round to infinity No
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add No
Support is emulated in software No
Correctly-rounded divide and sqrt operations No
Double-precision Floating-point support (cl_khr_fp64)
Denormals Yes
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero Yes
Round to infinity Yes
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add Yes
Support is emulated in software No
Address bits 64, Little-Endian
Global memory size 3221225472 (3GiB)
Error Correction support No
Max memory allocation 2254857830 (2.1GiB)
Unified memory for Host and Device No
Minimum alignment for any data type 128 bytes
Alignment of base address 32768 bits (4096 bytes)
Global Memory cache type None
Image support No
Local memory type Local
Local memory size 32768 (32KiB)
Max number of constant args 16
Max constant buffer size 2147483647 (2GiB)
Max size of kernel argument 1024
Queue properties
Out-of-order execution No
Profiling Yes
Profiling timer resolution 0ns
Execution capabilities
Run OpenCL kernels Yes
Run native kernels No
Device Extensions cl_khr_byte_addressable_store cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_int64_base_atomics cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics cl_khr_fp64 cl_khr_fp16

NULL platform behavior
clGetPlatformInfo(NULL, CL_PLATFORM_NAME, ...) Clover
clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, ...) Success [MESA]
clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [default] Success [MESA]
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_DEFAULT) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0, 4.19.0-5-amd64, LLVM 8.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0, 4.19.0-5-amd64, LLVM 8.0.1)
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ACCELERATOR) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CUSTOM) No devices found in platform
clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL) Success (1)
Platform Name Clover
Device Name AMD KAVERI (DRM 3.27.0, 4.19.0-5-amd64, LLVM 8.0.1)

ICD loader properties
ICD loader Name OpenCL ICD Loader
ICD loader Vendor OCL Icd free software
ICD loader Version 2.2.12
ICD loader Profile OpenCL 2.2

I've also read that hardware accelerated video decode doesn't work on SI/CIK cards running amdgpu driver (because it is considered experimental on those cards). However, radeon driver should offer working hardware accelerated video decode on those cards. So, if you are not using your card for heavy gaming (even then, amdgpu is only a must for vulkan support), switch to using radeon driver.
See if there are problems while running radeon.

This used to be true of Mesa 18.* and pre-4.18 kernels. I've had quite some pain. But in my experience, at least on my Kaveri GPU, I've seen that amdgpu has caught up to radeon and is now very stable.

[Wheelerof4te]

This used to be true of Mesa 18.* and pre-4.18 kernels. I've had quite some pain. But in my experience, at least on my Kaveri GPU, I've seen that amdgpu has caught up to radeon and is now very stable.

Today I learned. Great news for users of SI and CIK cards