Youtube much more hardware intensive than other videos?

[yhelothar]

I have a 1.6GHz Core2Duo laptop that has served me well over the years. Lately, online streaming videos has been quite choppy with the CPU at 100%
Many flash pages will also put the CPU at 100%.

I notice when I play various 1080p videos on my computer, such as WMVHD and x264, the video plays perfectly smoothly and only uses about 30% of my CPU.

But on youtube, it's choppy(10-14fps) and I get loads of dropped frames when I right click the video and view stats for nerds.

Is there any reason youtube with HTML/flash video is considerably more taxing on the CPU than other videos? I feel like it's a more recent thing in the past few years that it's become so processor intensive. Even my Hexcore Xeon is often capping out a core for the browser.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I have not noticed this - does it happen on all browsers for you? what if you create a new test user profile, does it happen then as well?

 

[TheELF]

Youtube went to html5 which is much heavier than flash,you can try to go back to flash with an extension,on chrome I use "Disable Youtube™ HTML5 Player"
But over the years more and more videos have become higher and higher resolution so slower CPUs are just not cutting it anymore its just the way things are.

If you want to have a really light Youtube player then check out SMtube (part of smplayer)

 

[yhelothar]

I have not noticed this - does it happen on all browsers for you? what if you create a new test user profile, does it happen then as well?

I tried it with IE and Firefox. It's the same. It helped to disable hardware acceleration.

Youtube went to html5 which is much heavier than flash,you can try to go back to flash with an extension,on chrome I use "Disable Youtube™ HTML5 Player"
But over the years more and more videos have become higher and higher resolution so slower CPUs are just not cutting it anymore its just the way things are.

If you want to have a really light Youtube player then check out SMtube (part of smplayer)

I just tried SMtube(sounds kinda kinky), and it's performance is much better. It used a third of the CPU resources!
I don't know if SMtube is using a different decoding method or if there is a lot of overhead with Youtube.

 

[ninaholic37]

I tried it with IE and Firefox. It's the same. It helped to disable hardware acceleration.


I just tried SMtube(sounds kinda kinky), and it's performance is much better. It used a third of the CPU resources!
I don't know if SMtube is using a different decoding method or if there is a lot of overhead with Youtube.

I have noticed this too. Running videos in an external program or different plugin always seem way smoother (perfect) than Youtube with Flash or HTML5 on my Pentium M. Maybe HTML5/Flash is only optimized for new hardware? I think Youtube also "slices" videos into fragments then rearranges them or something.

edit: SMTube in Linux working pretty good for me with VLC as output :thumbsup:

 

[TheRyuu]

Is there any reason youtube with HTML/flash video is considerably more taxing on the CPU than other videos? I feel like it's a more recent thing in the past few years that it's become so processor intensive. Even my Hexcore Xeon is often capping out a core for the browser.

It may be because youtube will use its html5 player by default which in Chrome (and possibly Firefox) will default to serving the webm format which uses vp9 for video and vorbis for audio. Unlike h264 there isn't a vp9 hardware decoder so it's entirely software decoded.

You can try watching the same video in IE11 which only supports mp4 (h264/aac) in html5 to see if it's smooth there. I believe you can also selectively disable webm support in Firefox somewhere in about:config.

On a suffiencly fast computer this shouldn't be a problem. The html5 player is as effiecent as any other software player on my i7-4771. The Flash player may be slightly more intensive than the html5 one but I can't say I've seen what you describe as "capping out a core".

 

[ninaholic37]

The html5 player is as effiecent as any other software player on my i7-4771. The Flash player may be slightly more intensive than the html5 one but I can't say I've seen what you describe as "capping out a core".

Yes, I think Intel "graphics" have come a long way in the last 10 years, especially for video. Probably because they were so far behind AMD and realized they need to catch up. :awe:

Turning off webm in Firefox breaks HTML5 for me and doesn't make videos any smoother with Flash (intensive ones are jittery like they're running at 3fps, even at 360p, turning off Hardware Acceleration seems to help a tiny bit for Flash, maybe 5fps). Streaming through SMtube + VLC or GNome is perfect here though.

 

[ArisVer]

Youtube, HTML5 music video at 480p, IE11, Windows 8.1.
IE11 used 4-8% CPU according to task manager.
Pentium B980, Intel HD "Graphics".

 

[ninaholic37]

Youtube, HTML5 music video at 480p, IE11, Windows 8.1.
IE11 used 4-8% CPU according to task manager.
Pentium B980, Intel HD "Graphics".

Yup. I owned three Intel netbooks, an Atom N270 (2008), N570, and N2600 (2011) and one thing is for sure, the video playback of the IGPU got much better through every iteration. With N2600 I could play even 720p videos no problem I think (which was even before the Pentium N980). Single-core CPU performance didn't change much though, it was just able to "off-load" more to the GPU.

 

[ninaholic37]

edit: Google conspiracies removed (they paid me to keep quiet)