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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

> The Pi 2 managed to open the browser and actually started playing back a 1080P video, which was surprising, but playback was terrible.

A Youtube tab, web browser modern enough for YouTube, and OS modern enough for that web browser, all fit in 1GB of memory? Wow.

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Worth noting: A Pi 1 will decode 1080p h264 video flawlessly. I used one as a media center for a long time, running OpenELEC (now LibreELEC). Moving around the UI was a bit sluggish, but video playback was smooth.

YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose. I use Newpipe on an older (but not that old) tablet. Whenever Google breaks Newpipe and I have to use a browser, it takes like 30 seconds just to load the page.

Decoding video is trivial when you have hardware decoders.

I had this on my old laptop too, it would really struggle with HD YouTube, but if I copy pasted the url into VLC or MPV it would play just fine.

Are they even pushing H264 to the pi? Or is this more of their “you’ll take WebP and like it” stuff.

... Pis have hardware video decoders? I thought they were just fairly generic CPUs.

The original CPU was designed for set top boxes by Broadcom.

> YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose.

Exactly, which is why I thought this was a terrible and meaningless benchmark. It completely obfuscates the actual video playback performance of these machines. It is more a measure of how awful and inefficient YouTube is. I am surprised that the author did not remark on or seem to be aware of this at all.

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