Why Youtube 4K playback sucks on Linux?

Support Graphics & Display
2

Hello @tonyrulez :slight_smile:

The problem on Linux is that Firefox does not support Video Decoding over VDPAU (Nvidia), but supports VAAPI (Open Source) and at the moment only some Intel Chipsets.

OpenGL Rendering on the GPU is not the same as Video Decoding. Yes it improves Rendering, but not Video Acceleration.

If you need 4k, then it is a good idea to use a normal video player, which supports video acceleration.

Play the video with mpv for example.

pamac install mpv youtube-dl

pamac build ff2mpv-native-messaging-host-git

And install this Add-On: ff2mpv – Holen Sie sich diese Erweiterung für 🦊 Firefox (de)

Now you should be able to open a youtube link and click on the extension shortcut. It will open mpv with this youtube video with the highest possible resolution.

Here is how I did it on the terminal:

mpv --vo=gpu --hwdec=nvdec --hwdec-codecs=all --ytdl-format="bestvideo+bestaudio" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7hNmuizMB8"

You might want to add it to your mpv.conf:
~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

 vo=gpu
 hwdec=nvdec
 hwdec-codecs=all
 ytdl-format="bestvideo+bestaudio"
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