Force websites to use alternative video codecs by blocking AV1.
It appears that AV1 is not at all well supported on Wayland (Linux) Chromium for hardware decoding on Nvidia hardware. Blocking AV1 to allow for media playback to automatically fallback to better supported codecs like VP9 is a rather simple workaround in the meantime.
Additionally, for chromium browsers, the flag --enable-features=VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs might need to be set at ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf (or equivalent alternatives across Linux distros) for the fallback to work correctly. Otherwise the fallback could fail and resolve as CPU software decoding instead.
(Last updated 2026/June/25) [Last tested on CachyOS 7.0.12-1 with Google Chrome 149.0.7827.114]
