I have a Toshiba L655-S5155 I’ve been upgrading and using to learn Linux on.
I upgraded the processor in it a while ago from the p6200 to an i5-560m in hopes the device would handle 1080p video playback better. However it hasn’t helped.
I watch Twitch streams through streamlink, streamlink twitch gui and mpv.
720p 60fps seems fine however 1080p 60fps drops frames. I have it plugged into a 1080p TV through HDMI.
Stacer says cpu usage is only going to %50 max while it’s playing a stream. It’s the same in the Brave browser.
I’ve read this forum post however I’m unsure if it’d help me or not.
I removed the light-locker package due to it locking my laptop when I close the lid. The backlight turns off but I’m pretty sure the screen is still rendered. Maybe that is the issue?
Nonetheless I have the output from the inixi and tlp-stat command found in that post.
Better? Yes, but damn that’s an old CPU, not to mention that you’re using 4GB DDR3 RAM, which is a lot slower.
You only have 4GB RAM, you should create a swapfile of at least 8GB. This will help your computer run better.
I don’t know if your CPU would even support hardware acceleration because of how old it is. If it did, I’d recommend using Firefox with HW Acceleration.
Yes it’s old, but cheaper than buying a new system76 laptop. Not as good, but cheaper for sure.
I recently added an old SSD to the system and re-did the Manjaro install. I had a swap partition of 8gb when it was installed on the HDD and had the same issue. Even with the new processor. However I misread and you said swapfile. I’ll try this.
I was looking into buying different ram modules. The laptop can support 8gb officially, though I’ve seen YouTube videos of people using 16gb. This was the ram kit I was looking at. Slightly higher clock speed too. I’d rather not dump the money on it though.
I’ll look into trying LibreWolf instead of Brave and double check to make sure HW Acceleration is on providing its even supported. As well as creating a swapfile.
Honestly, I wouldn’t really upgrade that laptop any further. You can get a used Thinkpad that is way better for around $100-300. Some that even comes with an SSD by default as well as upgradable RAM & storage. Even better if you can find a laptop that supports Libreboot
More ram will not help you having better playback.
It’s just 4Go could be short depending of your running processes.
8 Go as swapfile is way too much, unless you run several virtual guests or some tasks requiring lot of memory, but i doubt your cpu could afford them.
Anyway, if you did not have OOM (while you had no swap file) means you have enough ram even if you have not much.
Now you have swap, you can decrease your swappiness to something like 30 or 20.
What about playing youtube video in 1080p ? Are you able play them well? How much is your cpu usage ?
Sure you can try to do what they say in the other thread to have hw decoding (with chromium or firefox), but not sure your cpu can support it.
I really don’t like this kind of advices :" Trash your computer and buy another one…"
Sorry mate, but maybe the OP can try alternate solutions.
At the end, if he realizes this is the better option, why not.
But definitely not a first option we should provide him.
Stacer says 65-75% on Brave fullscreen. Has the same problem as streamlink. 720p60 is absolutely fine though and seems I’ll have to settle for that. Though stats for nerds says it’s dropping frames but it isn’t noticeable.
I was looking at Thinkpads on eBay but was unsure as to what model to get. Not to mention I already had and now upgraded this Toshiba considerably. I was shocked to see the CPU mounted in a socket (G1) when I took it apart last year to re-do the thermal paste.
Did some research and found you can upgrade it. The HM55 chipset can use up to an i7-640m. However they’re pricey and I likely wouldn’t get the full boost speed. With this i5 I only get 2.850mhz when I should see around 3.2. Likely some hardware limitation somewhere. Or a setting I don’t have set in Manjaro. I haven’t done a test though since the reformat.
I have some sentimental value to this laptop since it was my friends and its similar to my first laptop (which I still have) a Toshiba Satellite L505D. However this ones specs are much better than the L505D and it’s in better condition too.
All I need now to finish it is some paint and clear coat. I ordered some stickers from eBay I want to put on but holding off until I do the paint job lol. Here’s some pics.
All I said was: “Honestly, I wouldn’t really upgrade that laptop any further”, and also gave options IF they want it, because it could cost more to constantly upgrading that laptop further and further, but not really get much improvement.
And they listed RAM from Amazon that is 1600 Mhz and mentioned that it’s a slightly higher clock than their current one, so I mentioned that their CPU only support DDR3 800/1066MHz
Yeah, the difference between i5-560m and i7-640m isn’t much. They are both 2 cores / 4 threads as well. I don’t personally know if the slightly higher base and turbo clock will make a huge difference on that generation’s of CPUs.
Note that although it says 3.20GHz turbo boost, it means on 1 core. But if you’re using 2 cores at a time, it’s reduced.
Just for future references, Arch Wiki has a list of which models work if you’re ever interested in the future! Though some might be missing from the list.
Also, I am curious, have you tried to run Windows on this laptop to see if 1080p 60fps works?
That being said, I had a laptop slightly better than yours (1 or 2 generation i5 CPU newer than yours) and I had issues on Windows watching 1080p on YouTube. 720p worked great though.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention,
you might not be using 100% CPU for watching streams because there is no hardware acceleration.
No I have not and I considered this. I think I’ll work on that now. I can easily change up the partition with gparted on the spare HDD for a couple 50gb ntfs partitions. Have one for 10 and the other for 7 to test things on. I was quite pleased to see this application run on a win 7 partition a few months ago I made with C# wpf.
The 560m was the best choice I feel to upgrade from the p6200. On this site it shows its a 53.5% increase from their benchmarks. It seems a bit quicker launching apps but not by much. Least it worked, was good to mess around with.
I added the swap file*. It helps it a little on its initial boot loading the desktop environment. However nothing in terms of 1080p 60fps streaming. Going to setup windows now.
You could start with doing some research about which video codec your streaming platform use.
Then, install libva-utils from Manjaro repo, and do: vainfo in console to see what you get.
After a long process that I figured would be easy. Turns out windows makes no difference. Well it seems slightly smoother, but it stutters. It’ll play fine for 5 seconds and then freeze for a second. Then resume.
Getting it all back together, had to take it apart some.
Pretty sure I’ll just have to settle for 720p60 which is fine by me. A little pixelated but pretty decent for a laptop that’s a decade year old. Reading the documentation @yannssolo sent, I’m fairly certain the correct version of that software is installed and configured. Maybe the output I listed will help.
Your CPU can decode h264 video, so if the video format of the streaming platform you use, use it too, that should be ok. Therefore, you have to force playboack to that format.
I tried forcing it to h264 but no difference. I used the --ffmpeg-video-transcode h264 flag when launching streamlink through the terminal. No change. By default streamlink says it’s set to copy. Whatever that means.
Unfortunately I’m thinking it’s just the CPU being too old. A friend of mine will be giving me some ram for the laptop in a few months. Suppose I’ll see then if that makes a difference but I still have doubts.
