I just want the Manjaro Arm to not fizzle the gui’s and run Firefox at speeds faster than 1980s era internet…
Or any desktop distro, even gnome or ubuntu
I blame the modern web for this
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?
I fully agree with the author but I was shocked when I saw iPhone 6S. Things were bad even back then?
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
Word. I often complain at work how programming and programmers seem to take “computing resources are cheap” as “USE FUCKING EVERYTHING”. There is fuckloads of bloat and web frameworks that are somehow marketed as “lightweight” despite making everything, even the development speed, worse in nearly every aspect.
Video playback is a wholly different thing, tho, because of all the encoding/decoding that keeps file size down.
But they should. Or at least comparable.
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?
You think it’s bad now? Wait until ChatGPT is the one coding things.
Modern hardware allows for bloat, and so bloat is made. Add in a huge helping of tracking everything you do, and you get a shit pi.
Now repeat but also mess up the code some more.
Behold: the true Web 3.0
It isn’t a a web problem. The experience is the same for any video playback on a RPI
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.
all Linux distros
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).
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.
Yes.
Everything you say is correct.
I have a 4B, with 4 gigs.
Everything is logical.
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.
The RPi 5 SoC does not have VP9 hardware decoding which is necessary for YouTube videos. Anything above 1080p30 inside a window will suck.
Weird part is that RPi4 SoC has it.
Edit: confirmed by Raspberry Pi Foundation themselves, only hardware video decoder is HEVC.
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.
Damn! My 3 and 4b are running headless, but my 5 has the GUI and runs high rez full screen videos perfectly on YouTube or streaming from my server. I would love to see how my 4b would play videos, but it’s headless and I don’t wanna mess with it. My 4b is running on an SSD as well (I think that’s unnecessary but I found a cool case)
Some tips:
- Rasberry pi OS is the lightest OS on pi
- Use Falkon as a browser, it’s much lighter
- Use mpv (or celluloid for simplicity) to watch YouTube videos and something like ytfzf (tui) or plasmatube (gui) for browsing YouTube
Also gnome is a desktop environment not a distro
My bad. Only slept 3 hours trying to get things to work last night. And 6 before that.
I had already resigned to just getting an Intel n100 mini PC for my purposes, but I might take another crack at it with your recommendations in the future, after I get some rest and stop dreaming of pies in the sky.
Except Raspberry OS. It’s still a bit sluggish for me. Manjaro KDE has been the fastest so far.
Theres better ways to play YouTube on SBC
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.
Very useful, I’ll try this too.
Question though - I thought yt-dlp downloaded videos?
And can sponsor block be integrated into this in any way?
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.
That’s extremely useful to know about yt-dlp.
I’ve only ever used it to download videos permanently fire offline viewing when traveling. I never knew it could work as a temp cache as well.
I’ll probably make a comment linking comments here with good solutions soon.
Ask that’s left is to figure out a decent IPTV program. Really liked Hypnotix but it seems it’s just too much for the Pi
That is why I do shit like this.
