HEVC videos do not play in the brave browser after installing nVidia drivers

General Help
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1

I'd like to report a problem I'm having with my laptop, and see if anyone knows the cause...

Hardware:
Laptop with Ryzen 7 5800H and two graphics cards
Integrated GPU: AMD Radeon Graphics (Vega 8), which comes integrated into the Ryzen 7 5800H.
Dedicated GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop (4 GB)
32 GB DDR4 RAM
Zorin OS 18.1 Core
Display Server: X11
Desktop Environment: Gnome

With a clean install of Zorin, using only the nouveau driver (without installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver), .mkv (HEVC) videos played from the browser work perfectly.

However, as soon as I install the NVIDIA OpenDrivers via apt, or the proprietary drivers from Software & Updates (I tried several versions), .mkv playback in the browser stops working correctly. The proprietary drivers even cause other problems (Wi-Fi and the mouse pad don't work). Open drivers work for everything except videos in the browser.

The symptoms are:
Black screen when playing videos in the Brave browser.
The audio may continue or stop depending on the situation.
If I uninstall the proprietary driver and switch back to using Nouveau, the problem disappears immediately.

What I tried:
Clean Zorin installation.
Different versions of the NVIDIA driver.
Tested in the Brave and LibreWolf browsers.
Complete reboots.
I tried running Brave in different ways from the terminal with different flags (for example, disabling hardware acceleration) and nothing worked.
Zorin OS is freshly installed and fully updated.
I tried installing Zorin Lite 18.1 with XFCE/X11 and the same thing happened.

Additional information:
The problem only occurs in the browser; it DOES NOT HAPPEN when opening an MKV/HEVC video from the file explorer.
The proprietary/open driver works correctly for everything else.

I suspect this might be related to:
hardware acceleration (VA-API/VDPAU), GPU video decoding, or some incompatibility between Chromium and the NVIDIA drivers.

I noticed this because I have a personal website for internal use where I watch videos (which are .mkv files encoded in HEVC). I need to use this computer with the NVIDIA drivers to be able to watch those videos.

Has anyone else experienced something similar or know of a solution?

2

Which Nvidia card are you using and what drivers did you install?

3

Welcome to the Forum!

You could try it with install additional Codecs. First, open gnome Software and scroll down to the end. there is a Button called ''Codecs''. Click on it and You get an Overview with Codec Packages. Install them all.

Then, open the Terminal and type

sudo apt install ffmpeg vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras

to get more Codec Support. The last Package is a Bundle and includes beside Codec Support Microsoft Fonts. Because of that, You will get a Licence Agreement Prompt. That is normal. Read it and navigate there with the Tab Key to ''Ok'' and press Enter.

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4

It worked after installing the codecs!!! Thank you so much! I didn't think it was a codec problem because it was working without the Nvidia drivers installed, so I assumed it was something else. Obviously, when you install the drivers, you need to install the codecs too.
:ok_hand:

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