Remember when if your aunt wanted you to build her a computer that she'd only use for "web browsing", that meant you could opt for the cheap components?
Last year, I got myself a new Camera, a Lumix S5, and after uploading some photos to DeviantArt (I have had the same account for almost 20 years) and browsing my gallery I realized that I had had enough.
It was so slow and annoying to work with.
So I sat down and started work on a simple webpage that I could host on a normal webhost.
And I built a nice index page in HTML/CSS, and then used photo albums generated by digiKam for the photo albums.
It loads fast, it is easy to navigate, fairly easy to update, and the photo albums can be navigated with arrow keys or swipe gestures.
I am considering writing a blog UI for me to be able to make a simple blogging page, I'll still write it in static HTML/CSS, so I'll have to write every blog entry in HTML as it stands now, but I'll keep looking for easier alternatives
Think about the difference between Reddit and Lemmy. They both offer similar functionality, but Reddit will set your phone on fire if it gets the chance.
The same is true for YouTube. Browsing YouTube is scrolling through an image gallery, only video playback should be a problem. Yet, it will consume more resources than a well equipped laptop had when YouTube was launched. That's insane.
We're moving in a direction where computers get faster and faster, but for the last 10 years or so, the actual utility of the system as a whole stagnated. Besides games, what can a modern computer do, that a 2014 model couldn't?
Yeah, it's amazing how upvoted the previous comment is. Just a bunch of idiots jumping on the web-hate bandwagon when even basic media players like Kodi have a tough time playing back video on the Pi.
It just isn't a very optimized device for video playback. The Pi 5 is actually a step backwards as well, providing only H265 hardware video decode which the web doesn't even use.
This is not a Linux problem; Windows 10 would fare way worse. Maybe similar on a Pi 5, I've seen a review and it handles Full HD on either OS (only Linux can get consistent 1080p60 though).
I have a Pi5 hooked up to my living room TV and it does indeed play 1440p60 with zero issue. The OS is a bit laggy getting into the video, though. I want a case like I have for my Pi4, a case that allows for a built-in SSD.
There’s hardware video encoding/decoding support. I used a Pi3b+ to transcode video for a while and would easily get 2x or better on full 1080p video. The 4 is better and I’ve heard even better on the 5, but I’ve not had a compelling reason to spend that much to find out.
Yet I've still been unable to achieve that despite trying multiple distros. Only Android of all things has successfully played YouTube (via smart tube) and video without any issues. I've also yet to see video evidence of smooth playback aside from one person on YouTube (Computers Explained I think), and it was only on Raspberry Pi OS. Which in fairness I kinda do too, but it takes like 12 seconds average to load a webpage on their version of Firefox (no added extensions) and either 5 or 30 on Chromium for some reason.
I've been trying to set the Pi as a htpc (that's not a lobotomized Kodi box) that can also do minor streaming and a few other things, for 5 days and counting. I made a nice click friendly desktop with Manjaro KDE for Pi, and the OS itself is snappy and fast. But any major video graphical elements and it becomes a geriatric Commodore 64.
I know (read:guess) it must be that something going wrong with hardware acceleration, but just can't figure it out. Maybe my Pi is cursed.
Even on the Pi 5 the basic desktop environment in RPI OS with hardware acceleration working feels sluggish. I'm not sure if it's some weird power savings thing, but the pi just drops frames whenever it feels like it.
My experience is similar. I don't play YouTube videos on my 4B with 8GB of RAM very often. When I do, I make sure it's well less than a quarter of my 1920x1080 screen. (I use a tiling window manager, so I usually just make my browser window the top-left quadrant of my screen and don't theater-mode or anything.) And I often reduce the quality to 480p or whatever.
If I'm going to watch something longer than a few minutes and want to be doing other things on my Raspberry Pi while the video is running, I'll just pull it up on my phone propped next to my monitor.
The issue is trying to run a video in Firefox. Modern web browsers consume a lot of resources. Also they don't use your hardware efficiently for video playing. You need to take some time to set up a native video player application to play YouTube videos. This better uses the SBC hardware acceleration without wasting precious resources.
How to play YouTube through SMPlayer
Use your operating systems software installer to Install the latest versions of smplayer, smtube, and mpv. Use smtube to select a YouTube video. This sends the network stream URL to smplayer which detects its a YouTube video and downloads the latest yt-dlp to help stream it. If everything is up to date, it plays great.
Not all OS keep their software up to date. Some prefer older stable packages. So its important to use a OS that keeps this software updated. I know for sure MX Linux works with its default software repos out of the box. Its available for Pis, though I have not personally installed on a PI.
Configure SMTube To Use Invidious
Once you get YouTube videos playing, go into settings of smtube to change the web page from tonvid to a custom invidious instance. Pick one thats ideally from your country and that lets you register an account. That way you can import subscriptions and personalize stuff.
Hiccups when using smtube to load an invidious site: the default language will be some foreign language. Make sure you know how to go to settings in invidious and change to english.
To load the video click on small youtube icon bottom right of video.
Old Hardware Given New Life
I have revived lots of old PCs over the years. Giving them a new lease on life with up to date linux operating systems for friends and family. I have a 15 year old laptop that was finally having a hard time running latest linux mint xfce. This week I got to work reviving it.
I gave mx linux a shot as I liked ExplainingComputers review of the OS and thought it good fit for my use case. Installing these programs right from MX's software repositiories was a breeze. Youtube played effortlessly! MX is pretty minimal and im sure most pis can run it okay, so give it a shot if you want a OS with up to date repos for these packages if youtube is one of your main concerns.
When you 'stream a video' from firefox it just downloads the video in small chunks at a time instead of the whole thing at once. These chunks of downloaded video are saved to temporary memory called a 'cache' and deleted after you are done the video.
Yes yt-dlp is most often used to download the entire video as a digital file onto permanent memory; however it doesn't have to be used that way. Other applications like smplayer and mpv can work with yt-dlp. Using it as a component to do the heavy lifting of talking to youtubes servers and streaming video in the same exact way firefox does.
Doing a quick search, there are some projects to implement mpv with sponsorblock. Im not the most technical person and prefer not to get my hands dirty with complex hacked together scripts that require compilation or whatever. Thats not to discourage you if you want to follow up on those things know people are working on it but if you aren't a power user it may be a hard time to get that kind of thing working.
Try it in a vm if you don't want to install it on bare metal (that isn't a raspberry pi)
You can also find cheap ass second hand laptops on ebay for similar prices to pis but should have much better performance, especially if you're willing to do some upgrades like installing a cheap ssd instead of the hdd.
Raspberry PIs don't have a proper GPU with decoding. That's part of why they stink. The other issue is that they are locked to the Raspberry Pi kernel. They are absolutely proprietary!
You just need a program that actually supports the hardware video decoder. I've played 30-40mbps bluray rips on a Raspberry Pi 1B without any issues in kodi. The video played smoothly with no frame drops. The user interface was very sluggish though.
The GPU and video acceleration on the Pi is weird, so software has to be built specifically for it.
2 or 3 at a time normally but I'm fairly sure it could handle more depending on modpack
If you're doing it you need to get absolutely all the optimisation mods you can for the version and most importantly pregenerate the world. Once you do those things with two or 3 on it'll hover around 80% CPU usage
I will say with 4 players on Infernal Origins it struggles, I suspect because it turns up the mob spawn rate, adds custom mob AI and generates massive unlit caves everywhere for them to spawn in
On the ATM server we have 5 max upgraded apotheosis mob spawner grinders running 24/7 chunk loaded and the server's still pretty snappy still
Same setup as you, fan and NVMe and I can play 720-1080p video without any issues from all of the streaming platforms I've tried so far as well as local files. Also streaming 1080p 60Hz gameplay from my gaming setup over LAN with no problems.
External video card would probably work well now that you mention it. But at that point, for what I want to use it for, I might as well do an Intel Mini PC since it would use less power.
But good project idea if I ever want to set up a Minecraft server.
I don't know moonlight and don't know what you mean by “certain typed documents”, but AFAIK, OSMC is just Raspbian with some additional stuff. What I am saying is that media playback works just fine performance-wise for some media formats.
Huh. I use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a media center PC running Kodi / libreelec.. Literally all it does is play videos and music. Even 4k h.265. This meme makes no sense to me.
Kodi / Libreelec are in the same vein as Android TV. There extremely neutered operating systems that can basically only do that one thing, so if they failed at it, well...
You can really edit documents, run YouTube with a decent UI, possibly use sponsor block, can't do video game streaming.
Actually, I take it back, Kodi etc are more limited than Android TV on the Pi, since at least that supports Steam Link and Moonlight streaming.
So yeah, like Android, it can play the video. But it can do anything else like if I were to run any actual distro.
Oh yeah it's totally an appliance OS built around Kodi and not a general purpose OS. I do use it to watch YouTube though. I'll "send to Kodi" from my phone and it plays on the TV. I use a full desktop computer for all the other stuff you mentioned. I only brought up Kodi on the raspi because this meme specifically calls out videos, which do work quite well (as long as it isn't a vc1 encode apparently).
Yeah I can't speak to that as I don't have anything encoded in vc1. After a quick search I see that's a proprietary Microsoft codec so that's probably why I didn't encode anything with it.
Let me know if you find a fix. I'm trying to stream 3 of my cameras to the Synology surveillance GUI, and it's a fucking slideshow. I get a few frames a minute.
Gonna try the same thing on an orange pi