I think that will be great for old hardware. I have a very old Thinkpad R50e here where Youtube did not work properly in the browser, at least not above 240p iirc, but you could download the video and watch it with vlc. The difference was the hardware acceleration, and I specifically remember VA-API (together with a second acceleration API?) as coming up at my research back then and being disappointed the browser would not use it. So this could be a nice improvement for a wide range of old devices.
It would be awesome if this means Google Stadia is coming to FF on Linux. I trialed the service and was very impressed with it, but ultimately decided against a subscription since Chrome for Linux does not support Stadia due to lack of HW acceleration (it runs but is unusably slow).
More context in these blog posts from the author of the patches:<p><a href="https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-on-wayland/" rel="nofollow">https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-ac...</a><p><a href="https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/" rel="nofollow">https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor...</a>
Finally. For a long time it has been quite embarrassing that playing video on a modern laptop drain the battery like nothing else. Looking at the CPU usage shows just how bad it is.<p>At the same time, mpv has been able to play the same videos for years with hardware acceleration. The only reason FF hasn't implemented it was because they were worried about it failing on some systems. Why they couldn't even have enabled it using a flag I don't know.
I wonder if this will improve performance for video chat in browsers. I've tried Zoom in Firefox and Chrome on FreeBSD with modern hardware, but the experience is very disappointing (about 5 fps, audio stutters, etc).