Re: [LUG] Jittery playback

[Eion MacDonald <maceion@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/06/2020 21:56, comrade meowski wrote:
> On 01/06/2020 21:43, rich@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
>> Just to add, I use Vivaldi as my browser, tonight I used Firefox on
>> the second monitor and it had a slight hiccup but nothing more than a
>> couple of seconds. Is there anyway of looking at my activity to see if
>> Vivaldi is causing a problem please?
> 
> 
> Ok, after a quick look at this I have a definitive answer for you:
> Vivaldi on Linux does NOT yet support hardware acceleration for
> $reasons, none of which particularly make sense. Ignore the many
> conflicting accounts online of people arguing about this exact subject:
> they're all wrong, it doesn't work, Vivaldi haven't pulled the Chromium
> VAAPI patches etc in from their upstream for some reason. Windows and
> Mac are different. What might help is running this and reporting back
> what happens:
> 
> ghost@failbot:~$ sudo /opt/vivaldi/update-ffmpeg
> Proprietary media codecs (80.0.3987.149) was already present
> 
> You may have omitted installing Vivaldi's custom ffmpeg support package
> in which case the command will fix that for you. If it's already
> installed and you see the same result as mine, you're out of luck.
> 
> To further explain: Vivaldi does not have hardware acceleration on Linux
> so is falling back to software rendering. Surprisingly it seems that
> your Lenovo T41 is too weak to handle that (which seems a bit suspicious
> to be honest at the low resolutions you were trying) hence the terrible
> results. Firefox on the other hand on your laptop seems to be modern
> enough that WebRender hardware accelerated playback is available by
> default and works just fine.
> 
> A good test is here:
> 
> https://help.vivaldi.com/article/html5-proprietary-media-on-linux/
> 
> Try to play back the embedded video in Vivaldi to see what happens. To
> monitor your system, run any process monitoring tool of your choice and
> start a demanding video up in Firefox and watch what happens. You'll see
> a heavy spike of activity but hardware acceleration should keep it
> stable and not too demanding. Try the same video in Vivaldi and see what
> happens - even with the correct vivaldi-ffmpeg installed I predict
> you'll see an enormous CPU spike compared to Firefox as your Lenovo
> ramps up and fails to deal with the load. That's hardware offloading in
> action for you. If you're not sure what monitoring tool to use I'd
> suggest "htop" by the way.
> 
> Part of the reason people seem so confused about this online (including
> the Vivaldi devs whom to my surprise seem a bit thick quite frankly) is
> that if you have a sufficiently powerful system even Linux Vivaldi will
> work just fine with only software rendering - testing one of my
> preferred YouTube 4K@60fps sample videos worked perfectly for example.
> But that's only because my workstation's big ass Zen CPU had shot up to
> 80% load on all cores. The same video on Firefox ran at approx 25% load
> on all cores because the Nvidia GPU was picking up all the work.
> 
> So your answer is as first suggested: Vivaldi is worthless for video
> playback on Linux _unless_ you have a very powerful system and enjoy
> wasting electricity unnecessarily. Use either Firefox or a
> Chrome/Chromium with hardware acceleration enabled for the job. There
> are a lot of left-field options still on the table as well though:
> 
> 1: use youtube-dl to "rip" the videos locally to playback normally
> 2: browser plugin to do the same
> 3: browser plugins like h264ify to force more "friendly" codecs
> 4: buy a cheap amazon firetv stick or similar for £20, stick that in the
> monitor/TV and use that to do youtube/netflix/etc
> 
> As usual you don't have a lot of options but to try them all and see
> what works.
> 

Thank you for all this education.
I appreciate the things I learn from LUG.
It helps me to help others.
(Especially the elderfolk I put on Linux so they can continue to use
older hardware safely)

-- 
regards
Eion MacDonald

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