alt Hacker NewsI’m curious how much AV2 will actually help older hardware in practice.
I’m on a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro: 2.6 GHz 6-core i7, 64 GB RAM. The machine is still more than powerful enough for normal desktop work and software dev, but YouTube in Chrome has become borderline unusable for me. My internet is fine, Safari plays the same videos smoothly, and YouTube “Stats for nerds” shows plenty of buffer but the decoding makes youtube unusable in chrome for me.
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I use Firefox but YouTube has recently started giving me a pop-up occasionally telling me that they are intentionally slowing down the site because they don't like some of the browser extensions I use.
Sound like a Chrome/Youtube problem. My 2012 Macbook Pro plays 1080p AV1 just fine in VLC (pretty sure Youtube works fine too in Firefox, but I didn't check whether or not it was AV1 or H264).
use the enhanced h264-ify to block the av1 stream, av1 takes a lot of cpu
Unfortunately for you, newer codecs use more CPU than older ones so AV2 would probably be even worse.
I gave up using Chrome a decade ago. It’s a power sucking pig. Safari has its own issues, but at least it’s usable. When I need something that isn’t Safari, I use Firefox.
Has nothing to do with video codec.
Download the video with yt-dlp & play it in mpv you'll see it even flies on a potato.
Play the same in browser and it'll be dropping frames left and right.