BETA: Chromium v51 ARMv6 w/ HW video acceleration (updated)

[kusti8]

Hello! Thanks to the tremendous effort made by the RPF, I'm pleased to announce a beta chromium that can work on a Pi1 or Pi0 and has H264 and AVC video acceleration. Now keep in mind that this is not stable and there are bound to be a few bugs, but I've tested it and it works remarkably well.

This Chromium is available from my repository in the dev branch. Because of it's higher version number, it will be upgraded if you add the branch. If you already have my repository (you already ran the instructions previously), simply add dev to the end of "deb http://dl.bintray.com/kusti8/chromium-rpi jessie main" in /etc/apt/sources.list and sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.
If you don't have my repo:

Code: Select all

wget -qO - http://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=bintray | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://dl.bintray.com/kusti8/chromium-rpi jessie main dev" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser rpi-youtube -y

A rpi-update is required for sandboxing to work:

Code: Select all

sudo rpi-update

NOTE: Youtube is VP8/VP9, so to have HW acceleration, install the h264ify extension from the Chrome Web Store

NOTE: GPU mem must be 192 now 80 for HW video to work. Add gpu_mem=192 to /boot/config.txt

Any bugs, please report them here.

Thanks!

[mikronauts]

WELL DONE!

Once stable, this should resolve the web video playback issue for good.

[kusti8]

WELL DONE!

Once stable, this should resolve the web video playback issue for good.

Thanks. It certainly keeps the CPU down and the video is more smooth.

[fruitoftheloom]

WELL DONE!

Once stable, this should resolve the web video playback issue for good.

Thanks. It certainly keeps the CPU down and the video is more smooth.

Great (cool) the Blink Engine compiled for ARMv6, is this for Raspbian Jessie ??

[kusti8]

WELL DONE!

Once stable, this should resolve the web video playback issue for good.

Thanks. It certainly keeps the CPU down and the video is more smooth.

Great (cool) the Blink Engine compiled for ARMv6, is this for Raspbian Jessie ??

Yup, Jessie with Blink.

[EdwinJ85]

Well done! Thank you so much. I know more work needs to be done, but getting accelerated video to work with chrome will make it a lot easier to use Pis in code clubs and more.

[HermannSW]

Nice work to make Chromium available on ARMv6.

But I hate to say it, on Pi Zero (with 192MB GPU memory and h264ify extension installed) even on "normal" website Chromium is much slower than Epiphany builtt in Raspbian web browser. Whenever an update is needed, CPU goes to 100% as long as needed. For example after clicking on this forum's "Forum" link and waiting so taht CPU goes to nearly 0%, and then clicking on "General discussion" link goes to 100% CPU for 5 seconds. I am writing this posting with Chromium, and the whole time(!!) CPU is on 100% only by three chromium-browser processes as shown by "top".

Hermann.

P.S:
I tried to tweet on this beta using Chromium on Raspberry Pi Zero, but it was not possible to select the screenshot picture and I had to tweet from a laptop (https://twitter.com/HermannSW/status/764569818028707840).

[kusti8]

Well, it looks like you have GIMP open. It's obviously not going to be fast on a Pi0, but compared to the always crashing Epiphany (which crashed when I tried to go to gmail and would even work with Inbox) it provides a more modern experience and is more robust. To me on a Pi0, it is about the same speed as Epiphany. Also note that video on a Pi0 won't be the best since much RAM will be given to the GPU.

Edit: Also, test Epiphany with 192 and compare.

[kusti8]

Well done! Thank you so much. I know more work needs to be done, but getting accelerated video to work with chrome will make it a lot easier to use Pis in code clubs and more.

Thanks. Youtube does seem smooth at 480p and 720p, so it works well.

[cjan]

test it Rpi2, youtube page crash no message.

[kusti8]

test it Rpi2, youtube page crash no message.

More info needed. What did you do and what did you not do? Did you make the gpu men change and install h264ify. What error message? What does it look like? When did this happen?

[cjan]

test it Rpi2, youtube page crash no message.

More info needed. What did you do and what did you not do? Did you make the gpu men change and install h264ify. What error message? What does it look like? When did this happen?

no message just crash
gpu_mem=192
install h264ify, there another one call h264 youtube?
disable RPI-youtube & Youtube Center Dev build exts

[kusti8]

It's the aww snap page? What did you do? Any particular youtube location or the homepage? We need more details to find out why this happens.

[cjan]

It's the aww snap page? What did you do? Any particular youtube location or the homepage? We need more details to find out why this happens.

youtube homepage crash
aww snap page ask to reload or more mem

[kusti8]

It's the aww snap page? What did you do? Any particular youtube location or the homepage? We need more details to find out why this happens.

youtube homepage crash
aww snap page ask to reload or more mem

Is this reproducible? What steps did you do? What does top show when it crashes again?

[cjan]

It's the aww snap page? What did you do? Any particular youtube location or the homepage? We need more details to find out why this happens.

youtube homepage crash
aww snap page ask to reload or more mem

Is this reproducible? What steps did you do? What does top show when it crashes again?

sorry, back to old version, maybe wait another confirm?

[Dis93]

Thanks kusti8! Works great for me, once I disabled the RPi-youtube and YouTube Centre Developer Build which I had been using.
I do get a warning when I launch, using unsupported command-line flag: -- no-sandbox, which I don't remember enabling nor can I find where to change.

Great job, 720p plays smooth as silk

[kusti8]

Thanks kusti8! Works great for me, once I disabled the RPi-youtube and YouTube Centre Developer Build which I had been using.
I do get a warning when I launch, using unsupported command-line flag: -- no-sandbox, which I don't remember enabling nor can I find where to change.

Great job, 720p plays smooth as silk

That's normal. I set it as default because HW acceleration needs that. I'm told this is being worked on.

[cjan]

does it conflict pepper-plugin?

[kusti8]

does it conflict pepper-plugin?

No it shouldn't

[HermannSW]

Well, it looks like you have GIMP open.

Gimp was only pen for making the screenshot, no other programs were open during testing besides a 1 sec "top" command in terminal to inspect Chromium CPU usage.

It's obviously not going to be fast on a Pi0, but compared to the always crashing Epiphany (which crashed when I tried to go to gmail and would even work with Inbox) it provides a more modern experience and is more robust. To me on a Pi0, it is about the same speed as Epiphany. Also note that video on a Pi0 won't be the best since much RAM will be given to the GPU.

Edit: Also, test Epiphany with 192 and compare.

I tested Epiphany on same PiZero with 192 MB GPU setting, and it was faster.

Today I installed Chromium with 192 GPU and h264ify on a second PiZero SD card and the experience was worse.

So finally I installed a fresh Raspbian Full desktop image on the 1st SDcard after taking a bakup of it:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Again I did all your steps, and Chromium experience is still bad. But I did it on fresh install so that you can recreate, please do so.

Here is the forum experience:
1. click https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/
2. wait until "top" with 1 second update does not show noticable CPU activity
3. click viewforum.php?f=63

With Chromium 3rd step does take 12 seconds of >90% Pi Zero CPU.
With Epihany on same system it takes 3 seconds of >90% Pi Zero CPU.

It took minutes to install h264ify plugin from chrome web store in Chromium.

Another bad very long load time of 100% is my twitter page:
https://twitter.com/HermannSW

Playing a youtube video is surprisingly smoot, but opening twitter.com takes a very long time of 100% CPU.

Since you describe different behavior, please redo these tests with fresh Raspbian install as I did.
If you experience the same as I do then, this means that you did not give as everything needed for a performant chromium experience.

Hermann.

[kusti8]

Can you take a video? Because for me Chromium loaded General Discussions in 3 seconds, and that's with a pretty bad Wifi dongle. I can't test epiphany because it got messed up when I ran autoremove so I'll have to do a reinstall. I will do some benchmarks to compare.

[dom]

But I hate to say it, on Pi Zero (with 192MB GPU memory and h264ify extension installed) even on "normal" website Chromium is much slower than Epiphany builtt in Raspbian web browser.

I wouldn't recommend testing this currently. gpu_mem=192 is okay for 1G Pi2/Pi3, but unusable with 512M Pi0/Pi1.
Work is ongoing to get video acceleration working with gpu_mem=64.

For now run with gpu_mem=192 for testing HW video decode on Pi2/Pi3.
Run with gpu_mem=64 (or even less) when testing on Pi0/Pi1. Otherwise you just get into swap hell with complex web pages.

[kusti8]

For anyone curious:

Sunspider on a Pi0 (gpu_mem=64) Lower is better:
Epiphany: 11044.4ms +/- 1.5%
Chromium: 19814.1 ms +/- 7.7%

So Epiphany is more lightweight.

HTML5 Test (Higher is better):
Epiphany: 289
Chromium: 487

But Chromium has more support for webpages and crashes less frequently. I can't tell you how many times Epiphany crashed.

I still have no idea where you got 12 seconds from. Can you take a video?

[cjan]

does it conflict pepper-plugin?

No it shouldn't

embed flash video can not play.