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Youtube requirements and acceleration

WildW

WildW

Senior member
Does anyone know much about the hardware requirements and GPU acceleration that Youtube uses?

Currently have a HTPC using an old i5 3570K (at stock freq due to cheap motherboard) with GTX 1050Ti, which is likely overkill for Kodi and Youtube @1080p that we mostly watch. Some family members are in need of gaming upgrades so I was thinking about moving some hardware around and let some older kit do the HTPC job, but I realised that I don't really know what I "need" for good Youtube playback without stuttering.

I have a good old board with an Athlon II x3 that I might press into HTPC service instead. I suspect the CPU would struggle with 1080p Youtube - I keep an older Athlon 64 for retro-gaming and it does not like even low-res videos. I have some Windows 10 supported GPUs available to use - a Radeon 5770 and 5850, but I've struggled to find any information about what kind of GPUs are supported for decoding Youtube. Does anyone have experience on what's likely to work well? Do you need a relatively recent GPU for hardware accelerated decoding or will older stuff like this work?
 
YouTube's main codec is h.264, so you'll want something that can perform hardware-accelerated decoding on it. Video cards tend to have their own decoding block, which changes over time. Fortunately, all of that information is readily available. Here's a chart for AMD's video cards. Based on that article, your 5770 and 5850 should have UVD2.x, which is capable of h.264 decoding. Here's a chart for Nvidia's video cards.

Fortunately, it appears that h.264 decoding has been around for quite a while, which makes sense given that it's a main codec used for Blu-rays.
 
Gave up on expecting any responses here, did some reading in the meantime. I thought YouTube had switched over to Google's VP9 codec which is only accelerated by Geforce 10 and some latest AMD cards. . . at least, that's what I read a lot of people complaining about in various threads from a year or two ago.
 
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