10.12dp2 16A239j MacPro6,1 has two AMD FirePro D500 cards (0x1002, 0x679e, 0x0000)

10.11.5 15F35 MacBookPro11,3 has an Intel Iris Pro (0x8086, 0x0d26, 0x0008) and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M (0x10de, 0x0fe9, 0x00a2)

These messages were logged by the GPU process. These also shows up in Console.app or log --stream, logged by the GPU process:

Timestamp                       Thread     Type        Activity             PID
2016-07-08 21:35:42.456398+0000 0x253d2a   Default     0x0                  43829  Google Chrome Helper: (VideoToolbox) [com.apple.coremedia.] vtDecompressionDuctCreate signalled err=-12913 (err) (Could not select and open decoder instance) at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia_frameworks/CoreMedia-1873/Sources/VideoToolbox/VTDecompressionSession.c line 1350
2016-07-08 21:35:42.478993+0000 0x253d2a   Default     0x0                  43829  Google Chrome Helper: (VideoToolbox) [com.apple.coremedia.] <<<< VTVideoEncoderSelection >>>> no video encoder accepted for 'avc1'
2016-07-08 21:35:42.479040+0000 0x253d2a   Default     0x0                  43829  Google Chrome Helper: (VideoToolbox) [com.apple.coremedia.] VTSelectAndCreateVideoEncoderInstanceInternal signalled err=-12908 (err) (Video encoder not accepted) at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia_frameworks/CoreMedia-1873/Sources/VideoToolbox/VTVideoEncoderSelection.c line 1327
2016-07-08 21:35:42.479086+0000 0x253d2a   Default     0x0                  43829  Google Chrome Helper: (VideoToolbox) [com.apple.coremedia.] VTCompressionSessionCreate signalled err=-12915 (err) (Could not select and open encoder instance) at /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/CoreMedia_frameworks/CoreMedia-1873/Sources/VideoToolbox/VTCompressionSession.c line 1009

It is most probably caused by 10.12. It will fallback to SW Encode in both cases AFAIK. I need to set up a 10.12 environment to debug further.

Also, looking at the 10.12 API Diffs, it doesn't look like anything changed for Obj-C VideoToolbox.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/releasenotes/Miscellaneous/APIDiffsMacOS10_12/

Do you have something that you can get a 10.12 beta installed on?

I don't have one right now. Is there anything I can access remotely? If not I will look for an Air to install on.

Moving this nonessential bug to the next milestone.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

When I boot the same machine into 10.11, I see these messages also, so I’m not sure that this is a 10.12 thing.

I don’t know of anything that you can get into remotely. Probably best to just try to grab a Mac loaner for something like this.

Yeah, I think that this workstation just doesn’t support hardware-accelerated h264 decode/encode. VideoToolbox may just wrap Intel Quick Sync for hardware acceleration, which isn’t supported by this CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz). https://larryjordan.com/articles/mac-pro-video-compression/

mark@, as per #8, can I understand this is by design? if so, can you please resolve this bug? thanks

The top of the line Mac hardware from 3 years ago doesn't support accelerated H264 video decoding? Am I reading this correctly? That seems....suboptimal. 

That’s correct, the system won’t hardware-accelerate H.264 decode or encode on the Mac Pro for us.

There’s a lot about “top of the line” being from “3 years ago” that doesn’t really add up. There’s also Intel’s practice of picking and choosing which features go into which CPUs. Intel’s made QSV a GPU feature, tying it to the on-board GPU, which the Mac Pro’s CPU doesn’t have.

Other discrete GPUs may be able to help (although I don’t know whether VideoToolbox knows how to talk to them) but I don’t think that the AMD FirePro D500 in this trashcan has hardware-accelerated H.264 decode/encode either.

But it’s plugged into the wall, so at least power consumption isn’t a big deal.