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Comment by LM358 | Hacker News Reader

Could it just be due to lack of hardware video decoding? The Pi3 has x264 HW acceleration and youtube started using other codecs a while ago.

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I have no idea if it still works, but the "h264ify" browser extension used to be great for working around this issue (by forcing youtube to serve h264) https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

i did a full apt dist-upgrade to try and get the h264ify plugin to install and if i remember correctly i never was able to get it to install. I upgraded from "chromium" to "chromium-browser" and set all the compositing and other settings recommended for the RPI.

and to reply to another sibling, "yt-dlp" isn't workable, this is for a senior citizen that does small motor repairs.

I got an HP elitedesk that's a few years old coming in monday to replace the RPI; hopefully that will last another 3 years before google et al decide to "optimize" again.

RPI 3 for a senior citizen seems like a poor solution in the first place.

I would have opted for a small business-pc that is x86 based and 3-4 years old.

a used laptop that can play youtube videos can be had for about the same money

ytdl-format=best[vcodec!*=vp9]

Probably. I remember when YouTube switched to H.264 (it might have been some Flash-based video before that). I had an older Mac mini hooked up to my TV at the time and suddenly video framerates dropped to an unwatchable level because they saved their bandwidth (and mine but I didn't have to care about my Internet service was not metered) at the expense of client-side processing.

Is YT so impoverished they can't manage some sort of negotiation mechanism that includes x264 and makes it work?

That might be more on the browser that you’re using. It might be saying “yes I can play this format” to a format it can barely play.

They encode videos ahead of time and they likely decided that whatever hardware you’re judging them by is only .9% of the market so fuck those guys.

Big companies use percentages in places they shouldn’t and it gets them in trouble. .1% when you have a billion users is a million people you’re shitting on.

For me that might be a dozen people. Very different.

Encoding and storing billions of videos in a format used by 0.1% of users feels like a waste though

The context above was exclusion of people based on income level.

robustness is only wasted if you're lucky

Supposedly, the whole point of Google financing “open codecs” was for them to break free from MPEG codec licensing. I imagine the total amount of fees had a lot of zeros. So, yes, each time they don't serve H.264 (unless absolutely required) results in saving a lot of money.

every yt video is available as x264 but vp9 is cheaper (smaller) and has better quality

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