H264 HW encoding for ChromeOS NACL broken in V65 (was working fine in V64). Any ideas?

[Elis Popescu]

The new Public release of Chromium (v65) seems to have broken the H264 HW acceleration which was available to ChromeOS Apps, built on top of NACL SDK.
I have an application which is built on top of NACL SDK (Pepper 49), and which uses the the pp::VideoEncoder class to encode video using the h264 HW accelerated encoder. Before updating the Chromebook to V65, the method pp::VideoEnoder::GetSupportedProfiles was returning an array with supported codecs which was including H264, but now, after updating to V65, H264 is not there anymore (there's only VP8 and VP9).

This is reproducible every time on a Lenovo 100s Chromebook (and potentially others as well - need to double check).

If relevant, note that going to chrome://gpu in the browser, I can see h264 encoding being available for  "Video Acceleration Information".

Any suggestions, or known bugs related to this? Has H264 encoding been dropped from NACL SDK?

[Maksim Ivanov]

Please file a bug at https://crbug.com - this may be a better chance of getting attention from the corresponding owners.

[Jake Barnes]

Also seeing this on a Toshiba Chromebook 2. We've been seeing it since early feb on dev channel as well. I would imagine this is intentional as h264 support has always been poor, presumably since Google don't use it themselves for Cast. For example it's never worked on ARM devices (see https://crbug.com/551761), and even on Intel the performance is not impressive. We're just going to switch to vp8 instead.