Snapdragon laptops get hardware video decoding in mpv and Chromium in the next Omarchy
A new helper hands video playback to the Snapdragon video chip, cutting Chromium’s 1080p decoding cost from 50 to 60% of a core to about 20%.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #15697 (GitHub)
Good news for anyone running Omarchy on an ARM laptop: video is about to get a lot cheaper. Birk Skyum merged “Decode video on the Snapdragon video chip in mpv and Chromium” into the quattro branch on October 17, 2026, and it’s coming in the next version of Omarchy.
Until now, mpv and Chromium decoded every video in software on Snapdragon laptops. That’s a waste, since, as the PR points out, the video chip handles H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1, and Omarchy’s kernel already ships its driver.
The fix is a new script, omarchy-install-video-decode, which only acts on Snapdragon laptops and leaves every other machine as it is. It runs at install time, through a migration on existing installs, and again after omarchy-refresh-chromium, omarchy-reinstall-configs or a browser reinstall, so the setting doesn’t quietly disappear.
For mpv, it puts hwdec=auto-safe,v4l2m2m-copy at the top of ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf. mpv tries that list in order, so it falls back to the V4L2 decoder instead of software. If you’ve already set an hwdec value yourself, the script leaves it alone.
Chromium needed a bit more coaxing. According to the PR, Arch Linux ARM builds Chromium with the V4L2 decoder, but the browser only turns it on with --use-angle=gles-egl and the AcceleratedVideoDecoder feature. The helper adds both to ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf, and keeps any --use-angle flag you set yourself.
The numbers are what make this worth it. Testing on a Yoga Slim 7x with linux-omarchy 7.2.8, the author reports that 1080p in mpv takes about a fifth of the CPU of software decoding. In Chromium, 1080p H.264, VP9 and AV1 take about 20% of a core instead of 50 to 60%, and YouTube’s AV1 1080p60 plays on the video chip. Frames decoded on the chip match software decoding for H.264, HEVC and VP9, and if the chip isn’t available, both programs play the same clips in software as they do today.
Other ARM boards with a V4L2 decoder, such as the Raspberry Pi 4, stay on software decoding for now: the shared /etc/mpv/mpv.conf is still set to auto-safe until someone tests them.
It wasn’t the only ARM work merged that day: bprendie landed the desktop camera access setup for the Snapdragon ThinkPad T14s (#15331) and an internal microphone fix for the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q (#15574), a day after emirb started publishing a nightly aarch64 edge ISO on nightly.omarchy.org (omarchy-iso #282).
