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Comment by simon1573 | Hacker News Reader

How well would this hold up as an HTPC? Any reasons to avoid it?

A Raspberry Pi 3 is more than sufficient as a HTPC in my experience.

Have you managed to get streaming services like netflix working without stuttering per chance?

When I tried via a web browser a while ago I couldn't get it to work well, iirc I had to install a plugin from somewhere too.

If you want to stream high-quality content neither this one, nor it's older brother N2 are not suitable due to DRM and other issues. You'd end-up spending to much time to troubleshoot all problems.

Edit: I own Odroid N2, spent several weeks trying to make it working well. At the end I've given up and got an Intel NUC device.

I don't know what that person is doing with a pi 3, but my experience is that retro pi works well but modern video or web browsing is not going to hold up.

The Pi 3 doesn't have HEVC hardware decoding, but the 4 does.

It's still a pain in the ass watching a 720p youtube video on Raspbian+RPi 4 from Firefox. It's barely fluid when windowed while stutters as hell in fullscren with the CPU constantly overheating, and 1080p is much worse. Under Kodi it's way different, of course, still I wonder why one can't have video acceleration on the desktop.

Latest Firefox release has video acceleration support, only under Wayland for now.

It's complicated. Basically, when you are playing Firefox, there is a lot of memory copying going on.

If you download your youtube videos beforehand using youtube-dl and play using omxplayer, the result is virtually glitch free.

A better option is to install the YouTube extension on top of Kodi on Raspbian. You might also need to disable the new OpenGL driver as well. Once that is done, Kodi (which has Pi GPU patches in place) can play YouTube at 1080p30 beautifully.

"A better option is to install the YouTube extension on top of Kodi on Raspbian."

Yup, that was how I watched Youtube videos for years (although Kodi was on LibreElec). Now unfortunately all Kodi extensions using Google APIs require registration, which of course is a huge privacy violation since I'm (still) not forced to do that on browsers.

Hell, I was streaming and decoding 1080p on Kodi/VLC/Youtube with no issues for a couple of years on a 2B.

Yep, Pi2 was totally OK as a video playback machine unless you were trying to play H.265/HEVC files, in which case it'd struggle with them over SD resolutions. Pi4 adds hardware decoding for that so now it's fine.

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