This is a spin-off question from a comment on HN post "Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom" ( https://meet.jit.si/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 ).

Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom, Slack) consumes a full CPU all the time (a.k.a. no hardware acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.

I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU, and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration (intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.

In the aforementioned post, user jasondclinton says that hardware video decoding is coming to Firefox on Wayland ( https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-76-VA-API-Formats , https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619258 , https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D65536 ). So if I understand correctly, this means conferencing over WebRTC with codecs H264/VP9/VP8 (and maybe others? The merge request says it "enables VA-API for all formats") will be accelerated in Firefox on Wayland. That's good and I'll try it.

Apart from that,

- Do you know of any other options? Regarding Zoom/Slack/Skype/etc, I'm not very surprised: Linux market share is low, so from a money perspective, fixing this may not be the best spending of engineer time.

- Finally, I'm surprised that acceleration could be missing in Chrome on Linux, because Google must have worked on it to ship a good Google Hangouts/Meet experience on low-powered Chromebooks. Am I missing anything? (Is there a flag / dependency / binary package I could need to enable it in non-Chromebook Chrome?) Is video acceleration really positively nonexistent on Chrome/Chromium on Linux?!

Thanks!