It can play video no problem on other sites or in VLC. It's just YouTube and just on that PC...That PC can run Doom Eternal. Video content shouldn't be a problem.
I can imagine that your older computer might have native support for decoding the high-res h264 video, but not for the high-quality OPUS audio stream, causing them to decode at different speeds.
I don't think there's a solution to that problem that doesn't involve running a dedicated video player such as VLC.
That said, I've also heard a lot of complaints from people still using Adblock Plus. I don't know what rules ABP has implemented, but they seem to affect Youtube performance much worse than uBlock whenever Youtube changes something.
I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.
Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.
Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.
Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?
Sorry, but drive-by philosophy is not applicable here.
YouTube developers single out adblocker users and taunt them with an "Experiencing interruptions" toast prompt that locks the video stream for ~5 seconds. Curiously, it contains a link to the YouTube Help Center, to the section fragment "#check_ad_blockers". In other words: "yeah, we know you've got uBlock Origin enabled, enjoy the speedbump".
Player base.js:
api.XL("innertubeCommand",{openPopupAction:{popup:{notificationActionRenderer:{responseText:{runs:[{text:"Experiencing interruptions?"}]},actionButton:{buttonRenderer:{style:"STYLE_OVERLAY",size:"SIZE_DEFAULT", text:{runs:[{text:"Find out why"}]},navigationEndpoint:{commandMetadata:{webCommandMetadata:{url:"https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3037019#check_ad_blockers
If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker."
When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change.
In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that makes any sense at all.
Is it incompetence or sabotage? Who knows. The first rule of sabotage is to be indistinguishable from incompetence.
We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.
But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."
That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.
Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
I have weird issues with YouTube on my home PC. If I have a Chrome window with a YouTube video running to the side of my monitor, it always inevitably ends up freezing up the whole display. Ctrl+Alt+Delete and cancelling back in makes it go away briefly, however sometimes it can just keep freezing the monitor up constantly.
The weird thing is, the PC (running Windows 11) has a powerful graphics card which can handle AAA games (as of earlier this year at least), graphics drivers are all up to date, and YouTube works fine in fullscreen across the whole ultra-wide monitor.
I just can't work out what's causing it. It makes running YouTube side-by-side with other programs a real pain in the ass. It's been like this for months now. Checked browser HWA settings, and they're all as they should be.
I recall h264ify but not sure about it
I looked now and noticed that I actually reject VP8 and VP9 and accept AV1. I run Linux on a Ryzen 4750U, for the record. It did not have trouble chewing through VP8 / VP9 without skipping frames, but it ran unpleasantly hot.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110302145602/http://www.vertic...
Which is almost what AV1 is, native hardware decoding is slowly slowly progressing
That said, I've solved this problem for myself on macOS and Firefox by setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config, as all other codecs used by Youtube are hardware accelerated on my Mac.
The way the browser can still participate in choosing is by e.g. not listing AV1 as supported when there is no hardware decoder on the local system. Both Safari and Edge took (approximately) that style of approach, but it comes with the downside that if the server only has AV1 video then the client gets nothing.
Practically, that downside isn't a big deal until codec support is high enough sites start assuming the codec is just supported and they don't need to host alternative options.
Apparently, there's even an API attribute that indicates whether a given codec is power efficient (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaCapabi...), which Google must also be ignoring – not their problem, after all. (I wonder if anybody did the math of the opportunity cost of losing a few ad impressions due to the user's battery dying early vs. the incremental bandwidth cost?)
This behavior comes and goes over time, for example it's been fine for several weeks in a row now. I assume it's punishment for running an ad-blocker.
My PC plays videos just fine, but it started sucking down 50W more than it used to, and AV1 was the culprit. Now that I've switched YT back to hardware-accelerated h264 playback, everything is back to normal.
That generally means they have to peg a desktop GPU for long enough to make a dent larger than LLM inference time.
Browsing with a 2 core box is like using a musket to blow a hole in a wall that’s optimized for armor piercing rounds.
Is this dumb? Of course. Your best recourse is probably to work around the anti-LLM blocks by having an agent read and summarize the page for you.
Are there any decent cloud based web renderers yet? Something like vnc or rdp backed by a shared 4090 could solve the problem. For static content, it’d only have to run proof of work once, then serve the result from cache.
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
it also integrates SponsorBlock!
It can use a ridiculous amount of CPU.
It seems hardware accelerated only on windows chrome.
You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos (https://www.youtube.com/account_playback) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported.
Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume equalisation can also impact performance, though that kind of depends on how fast your web browser is at executing Javascript, and to a much smaller extent.
The substantial bandwidth savings are here to stay, though, so in time I think Youtube will move to AV1 more often.
Well, is it higher or lower?
What option are you referring to here? I don’t see anything that seems related to that.
Once you carefully whitelist the resource it wants the CPU usage goes down again. At least that fixed it for me (I was mistakenly checking various codec related settings in Firefox first too to find a solution.)
The reason I bring it up is because I tried to actually profile it a handful of times, but my C++/Rust/Python knowledge was completely useless in the face of a browser development toolchain.
Did I miss something, or is it not possible to easily see what functions take the meat of javascript execution time?
(it feels really absurd if it's not easy, given that people can essentially serve whatever arbitrary script they want and my computer pretty much has to deal with it if I want to use whatever site)
I'll just leave it like this (480s of samples..?): https://imgur.com/a/IgaHOdX and come back in a few hours.
bArray•2h ago
burgerrito•2h ago
snickerdoodle14•2h ago
But you probably won't be able to make much sense of the results without a lot of effort because of all the minimization/obfuscation.