Re: riddle me this: youtube kills my usb hub

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

In comp.os.linux.misc, Computer Nerd Kev  <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

It's specific to Firefox playing the video.

 
Does Firefox use GPU hardware video decoding (look for
"HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING" on the about:support page)? I'm not sure
if mplayer does hardware video decoding, ffmpeg requires specific
options to enable it. You also need the relevent drivers installed.
Hardware will also only support certain codecs, so it's possible
that only Firefox is using it, with a video format used by YouTube.

 
It is "available". I don't know if it gets used, but probably. Youtube
videos play, so however it happens, it works.

They'd play with CPU decoding as well, but it sounds like a good
possibility that hardware decoding is used on YouTube.

You think something about hardware video decoding could bump my hub off?

I gather this is some laptop/tablet computer since you say it's a
"Surface". These days they tend to build lots of functions into the
same chip ("lspci" often shows evidence of this) with such
computers, and the same chip doing USB and graphics is quite
possible. So I can easily imagine a bug in one driver, for h/w
video decoding on the GPU, messing up USB if it's done on the same
chip.

Is there an about config to try turning that off?

I disable video playback in Firefox so I don't know for sure, but
this setting looks like a safe bet for disabling it in
about:config:

media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled = false

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