Enable Hardware Acceleration Support (macOS ARM ✅ | Linux x86 (AMD/Intel) ✅ | Windows x64 (AMD/Intel) ✅ | Linux ARM ❌)

[atxpixel]

I've tried the app on a fresh install RaspiOS and it worked great.
I've tried the node-carplay app to test something. (offtopic it's much more smoother(high fps) than pi-carplay...any ideea how to make pi-carplay to be that smooth?)
After this i started again the pi-carplay appimg from desktop and my resolution is weird and with low fps. I tried to change the resolution(dongle reseted) but nothing happend.

Is there a configuration file somewhere that node-carplay modified and that pi-carplay reads?
I tried to take a screenshot using "scrot", but apparently the result is just a completely black image.

[mbt28]

Hello,

Are you trying node-carplay from chrome? Maybe it is about the browser which render it faster. Which PI are you using? For me earlier than PI4 doesnt have enough fps.

[atxpixel]

Hello!
Raspberry pi 5, SSD M2 hat.
Carlinkit cpc200-ccpa

Yes, I’m trying node-CarPlay from chrome.

[f-io]

pi-carplay runs as an electron app on chrome, which is why you download a 120 MB browser runtime plus a 4 MB application. In the Info tab, the Resolution field isn’t just a visual mock-up, it shows the exact frame dimensions extracted from the incoming H.264 stream. Note that this setting only affects the carplay video resolution, your desktop’s UI scaling and rendering remain entirely under your desktop environment’s control.

Please provide more information on your setup, because I can't reproduce your issue.
Are there running multiple instances? top / htop ?

Config file: ~/.config/pi-carplay/config.json

Be careful with installer scripts, some may intall fuse 2 (fuse/libfuse2), which will remove the os built-in fuse 3 (fuse3/libfuse3) packages. I haven’t tested the latest app with the older fuse.

---

Edit: Additional information: the carplay UI updates in discrete steps. For example, you must increase the resolution from about 800px to around 1400px to see a visible change in the carplay interface.

[atxpixel]

Thank you!
I’ve attached some photos with how react-CarPlay looks and how pi-CarPlay looks.
I’m using a wave share 1920x720 display + raspberry pi 5 8gb with a clean raspi-os.

[f-io]

Please provide an image of the info [?] tab, there you can see the stream resolution coming from your phone. If the resolution matches the settings, this is most likely a bug of react-carplay.

Here an image of a porsche carplay integration at 1920x720px.

Jfyi: A 100 ms media buffer isn’t practical.

Again, please do a fresh install and do not use the react-carplay install script, it will remove fuse3 libfuse3!
You can try running react-carplay without these old packages.

[atxpixel]

I have made a video with all the information and where you can clearly see the difference between react and pi-CarPlay. Indeed, it is probably strictly about DPI and UI scaling, but I am especially interested in the fact that pi-CarPlay is not as smooth as react.
Video: pi-carplay vs react problem.
https://youtu.be/iggMXvTxA3Y

Regarding libfuse2/3. I ran dpkg -l | grep libfuse and indeed I have both 2 and 3. I uninstalled libfuse2 (apt remove libfuse2) but apparently, the application doesn't want to run anymore.

LE: i've seen that node-carplay, which runs very smoothly is because it uses hardware-accelerated decoding.(i think)

LE2: I said I'd do a build directly from the system, I downloaded the source, npm install, npm start and in the terminal I get a lot of errors.
[17072:0622/182026.029050:ERROR:ui/gl/gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc:260] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 1 times!

[f-io]

Thanks for the video, that helped a lot!

Now, the "sad" part: this isn't going to be an easy enhancement. Hardware acceleration is already on my to-do list. At the moment, only WebGL and WebGL2 are functional. WebGL2 works on x86_64, but on the Raspberry Pi's ARM architecture, it falls back to WebGL. While you can make WebGL2 work on the Pi, the performance is worse than WebGL1.

WebGPU (Dawn), which can use Vulkan/Metal for hardware acceleration, isn't well-supported on ARM either, and even on x86 or Darwin, it remains experimental. There are also a few other limitations on how and where it can be used. I need some time to dig into this.

This topic is definitely one of my top priorities at the moment. I'm already testing on Electron 37, and hopefully, support is improving.

This is all part of the massive changes in Electron, many things that were allowed in earlier versions aren't allowed anymore. Most of these changes are for security reasons. This is also why this project is taking much longer than I initially thought.

[atxpixel]

I have an rpi5 with 8gb ram, and ssd, and the desire to help. If you need debugging or testing, give me a sign!

[f-io]

Could you try this build and let me know if it's any better?

[atxpixel]

I downloaded it, ran it, I feel some improvement, it's more fluent but it doesn't feel the same as react-carplay.

P.S.: I'm also on iOS 26 dev beta (since yesterday), and even the carplay interface is changed.

A bug that I noticed:
I have NO camera connected, but when I click on the camera tab, the system starts to respond very slowly even to mouse movements. I move it to the right and only after 1-2 seconds does this action.

It takes about 5 seconds, and then it recovers.