Good news for Omarchy on ARM: Birk Skyum merged a change on October 17 that moves video decoding on Snapdragon laptops onto the video chip in mpv and Chromium. It’s coming in the next version.
What it does
Until now, mpv and Chromium decoded everything in software on Snapdragon, even though the chip handles H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 and Omarchy’s kernel already ships the driver. A new script, omarchy-install-video-decode, only acts on Snapdragon machines:
- mpv: adds
hwdec=auto-safe,v4l2m2m-copyto the top of mpv.conf, unless you’ve set your own hwdec. - Chromium: adds
--use-angle=gles-egland the AcceleratedVideoDecoder feature to chromium-flags.conf, keeping any angle flag you set. - It runs at install, via a migration on existing installs, and again after a Chromium refresh or config reinstall so it doesn’t quietly disappear.
The numbers
On a Yoga Slim 7x with linux-omarchy 7.2.8, the author reports 1080p in mpv at about a fifth of the CPU, and 1080p H.264, VP9 and AV1 in Chromium at about 20% of a core instead of 50-60%. YouTube AV1 1080p60 plays on the video chip.
My take
This is the kind of quiet work that makes ARM laptops real daily drivers: less heat, more battery, no config spelunking. It builds on the ARM push I covered earlier.
