so ndufresne and kmingham I'm thinking of venus - ie video decoding support in-browser 
particularly
kbingham
not specifically video conferencing
since selfishly on qcom I'm thinking v4l -> libcamera -> pipewire -> {firefox || chrome || cheese || zoom} will work
but the picture for how to support - or what to in effect "push" distros to support for non-chrome - run a real linux distro on your laptop 
seems to lack a good answer for video decoder browser integration
ah but yes kbinghman actually you're right
we want the decoder - for decoding the video stream 
sorry yes
video calls is another use-case
not just netflix :)
obvs netflix is a bad example
youtube
ndufresne "chromium have been doing v4l2 codecs since 2010 in fact"
so maybe the right solution is patches for Firefox to bring feature parity with chromium ?
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/media/gpu/v4l2
bryanodonoghue: would be nice to get in touch with the devs on the Firefox side, but they seem to have chosen ffmpeg (if present) for accelerator, as ffmpeg is perfectly fine option for qcom venus, it seems very resonnable to enable it that way
and it might motivate folks in finishing the upstreaming of the stateless decoders in ffmpeg (patches exists, since they are used by LibreELEC)
what I don't know is if they have picked the VASurface -> DMAbuf -> EGLImage route (which works best in OpenGL ES), if they did, then its very straighforward to add v4l2
and adding qualcomm compression would be relatively traightforward too
as they say, give me time (a budget) and I know what to do lol