Stop using --video-capture-use-gpu-memory-buffer flag in beta/edge builds

[Kevin Keijzer]

Looking at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-overview-of-hardware-acceleration-in-chromium/36672, a couple of flags are added for beta and edge channel builds of Chromium to enable VAAPI.

You may want to remove the flag --video-capture-use-gpu-memory-buffer from the builds, as it completely breaks webcam input:

ERROR:video_capture_impl.cc(501)] Failed to open GpuMemoryBuffer handle

It can be worked around by creating ~/.chromium-browser.init and adding CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--disable-video-capture-use-gpu-memory-buffer" to it, but that is not exactly user friendly (and rather redundant).

Upstream the Chromium developers say that the --video-capture-use-gpu-memory-buffer flag is broken and that packagers should no longer be using it.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40279468

>> Do the packagers need to be advised to remove this, or should the flags work as intended?

> Yes. If you could inform them, please do so. On Chrome M116 that flag got broken, unfortunately. The flag had absolutely no effect before that, actually. In the future it will be enabled automatically when supported. So it's a good idea to remove that flag from the config for all versions.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

[Kevin Keijzer (kkeijzer)]

Sure, no problem.

Could you by any chance do a new build for the beta channel with this fix included? Then I can test if the webcam still works in the default configuration, without the ~/.chromium-browser.init file.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Sure.

And in case you are interested, you can always test "after-build time"
changes such as this using snap try[1]. Chromium's launcher script would
be in bin/chromium.launcher.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/docs/snap-try

Am 07/02/2024 um 17:53 schrieb Kevin Keijzer:
> Sure, no problem.
>
> Could you by any chance do a new build for the beta channel with this
> fix included? Then I can test if the webcam still works in the default
> configuration, without the ~/.chromium-browser.init file.
>

[Kevin Keijzer (kkeijzer)]

I've just tested the latest snap from the beta channel (2751). I deleted ~/.chromium-browser.init, and I can confirm that the webcam works fine now in the default configuration. VAAPI is also still functional according to intel_gpu_top.

Thanks!