Recently it was announced that in nightly versions of Firefox, which will form the basis of the release of Firefox 103 on July 26, a very interesting change has been made and it is reported that the accelerated video decoding by hardware is enabled by default via VA-API (Video Acceleration API) and FFmpegDataDecoder.
With which support for Linux systems with Intel and AMD GPUs is included that have Mesa drivers at least version 21.0, plus support is available for Wayland and X11.
For AMDGPU-Pro and NVIDIA drivers, hardware video acceleration support remains disabled by default.
It is worth mentioning that for those interested in being able to test this new functionality, you can do it manually, to do this just go to the browser settings page in "about:config", here you can use the settings "gfx.webrender.all", "gfx.webrender.enabled" and "media.ffmpeg.vaapi .enabled”.
You can use the vainfo utility to assess the driver's compatibility with the VA-API and determine for which codecs hardware acceleration is available on the current system.
If you want to know more about it you can check the details In the following link.
Last but not least, it is also worth mentioning that a few days ago Mozilla announced the release of its a set of tools for autonomous machine translation from one language to another, which runs on the user's local system without resorting to external services.
The project includes the Bergamot Translation Engine, self-training machine learning tools, and out-of-the-box models for 14 languages, including various experimental models for translating from English to other languages and vice versa. The level of translation can be evaluated in the online demo.
The engine is written in C++ and is a wrapper for Marian's machine translation framework, which uses a recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer-based language models.
The GPU can be used to speed up learning and translation. The Marian framework is also used to power the Microsoft Translator translation service and is primarily developed by Microsoft engineers in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Poznań.
For Firefox users, a plugin for web page translation has been prepared, which translates on the browser side without resorting to cloud services. Previously, the plugin could only be installed on beta builds and nightly builds, but now it's available for versions of Firefox as well.
Our solution to that was to build a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations so that matrix multiplication runs efficiently on CPUs. That allowed us not only to develop the translation plugin, but also allowed each web page to integrate local machine translation, like on this website, which allows the user to perform translations freely without using the cloud.
The Translations add-on is now available in the Firefox Add-ons Store for installation in Firefox Nightly, Beta, and General Release. We seek user feedback, and in the plugin you will see a button to complete a survey that will help Project Bergamot contributors understand in which direction we need to take the product.
In the browser plugin, the engine, originally written in C++, is compiled into an intermediate WebAssembly binary representation using the Emscripten compiler.
Among the novelties of the complement, the ability to translate while filling out web forms (the user enters the text in their native language and it is translated into the current site language on the fly) and evaluation of translation quality with automatic flagging of questionable translations to inform the user of possible errors.
Finally for those who are interested in the project, you should know that this is being developed as part of the Bergamot initiative, together with researchers from various universities in the United Kingdom, Estonia and the Czech Republic, with the financial support of the European Union. The developments are distributed under the MPL 2.0 license.