Fedora Updates Chromium With VAAPI Support, Here's How To Enable Hardware-Accelerated Video Decoding

Chromium was updated in Fedora with a patch that enables VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) support. When VAAPI is used, the video playback should be smoother, while also using less CPU and improving the power usage.

While this patch was rejected by the upstream Chromium maintainers, there are quite a few third party packages that include the VAAPI patch, for Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and others. And now, Fedora includes this by default!

Why is this so important? For example, my laptop (using Chromium on Fedora 29) had a huge CPU usage when playing YouTube videos, causing it to get very hot while also draining the battery:

This is the same video / Fedora laptop, but this time using Chromium with hardware-accelerated video decoding (VAAPI) enabled, showing a much lower CPU usage: