4K video & 1440p lagging on YT?

Hey guys.

I’m not sure if I’m writing in the correct location, apologies if so.
I use Brave mainly, but, same happens on Firefox and in both, hardware acceleration is turned on, however. When I want to watch a video in 4K or 1440p least, it lags in a sense that it feels like the FPS itself of the video drops below 30?

Could someone help me out with this?
My setup:

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
16GB RAM
RX5600XT
M.2 SSD

Are you using Budgie as your desktop environment?

Running a video at 30FPS should not be noticeable given most TV and film is 23FPS.

The main reasons for “choppy” video would be CPU use, overheating, and interrupted data transfer.

Have you checked the output of top to check on your CPU usage?

Are you certain that your local network (especially if wifi) and Internet connection can cope with the data required for high-resolution video?

Yes, I’m using Budgie DE.
I haven’t checked the CPU output, will get that checked tomorrow. As for my internet, it shouldn’t be a problem as I’m on 200mbps download and 30upload most of the time.

I would like to point out that I never had that issue on Windows (hell, not even on macOS on my MacBook) it seems to be a Linux specific issue I have.

I’d say you’re a long way from being able to claim that! There is nothing in your information given so far as to which version(s) of Windows gave you no trouble - or which releases of macOS for that matter. Even given that, it might be an Arch-based problem (not present on other Linux builds) or even specific to your setup, or settings. We’d need to dig a little further to guess which…

I think if I rephrase it, it would make sense: “It seems to be a specific issue I’m encountering when using Linux”

As for Windows version - 21H1: No stuttering of 4K/1440p content or as described the feel as if the FPS of the video itself dropped in frames.

macOS - Monterey: the laptop itself handles 4K video and below without any issues.

I dual boot Windows and Linux and I see the difference clear as day. So there is no issue with the physical hardware itself? I used to run Hackintosh on my PC too, that itself worked well.

Can you post inxi -Gx ?

Does the same thing happen when you download a video and watch it in a media player of some sorts?

Nowadays, that’s the main way I watch YouTube videos, I just download them in full, watch them, and then delete them. The YouTube web player is terrible, bloated, slow, very poor in features, and it spies on you.

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Ah, yes. If you have youtube-dl installed (or something else that provides its functionality and an appropriate symlink), you can watch directly in many players (mpv, vlc, celluloid, …). The added benefit of using mpv is its frame interpolation and upscaling features which make video look a lot better than on any HTML5-based web player.

mpv https://youtube.com/watch/blahblah
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What you want in this case is to get “Hardware video acceleration” running.
There are a couple of additional steps required to get it enabled.

Instructions for Firefox:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration

Note that GPU also needs to support decoding the video-codec that has been used to encode the video. (which you can find out with vainfo)

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Here is the output: Screenshot from 2021-09-25 10-45-36

@Kresimir
I tried doing it via mpv as @jonathon suggested and that itself works butter smooth. But it’s seriously not most convenient for user to constantly download the YT file to just watch it outside the web browser…

Here is a screenshot of htop when playing 4k video.Screenshot from 2021-09-25 10-54-55

See the link moson posted above, and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration for Chromium-based browsers.

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Thank you. This actually solved it as I found it thanks to @moson

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