The functionality landed on the Chrome Canary channel

Nov 9, 2017 20:00 GMT  ·  By

Chromium evangelist François Beaufort announced today that accelerated video decoding and encoding capabilities landed in the chrome://gpu page in the Chrome Canary experimental channel.

François Beaufort is always teasing Chromebook users with the latest features, and today he posted a message on his Google+ page that accelerated video decoding and encoding capabilities are now available in the internal chrome://gpu page in Chrome Canary.

It appears that the functionally works if you set profiles for various of the supported video codecs by Chrome OS, which can be decoded and encoded through hardware acceleration if your Chromebook is supported, which many of them are.

"For info, video compression standards (h264, vp9, etc.) define a set of capabilities also known as profiles (h264 main, vp9 profile 0, etc.) that can be decoded and encoded via hardware acceleration," said François Beaufort on the Google+ post.

Introducing the new Video Acceleration Information section

With this new hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding capabilities, the Chrome OS team implemented a new "Video Acceleration Information" section in chrome://gpu that lets you see which profiles are available for your Chromebook.

Additionally, the new "Video Acceleration Information" section will provide Chromebook owners with information on the maximum video resolution and frame rate supported by the hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding functionality.

Chromebook owners can easily enable hardware-accelerated video playback on their machines by enabling the "Use hardware acceleration when available" option in the System section in Settings.

Hardware acceleration is recommended instead of software acceleration as it saves CPU and RAM usages, as well as battery life on your Chromebook. And soon you'll be able to see detailed information on which video codecs are supported by the GPU of your Chromebook.