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Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

#31
post #15

If the video is encoded using a codec your hardware doesn't handle, it would be left up to the CPU to decode. Av1 can slow everything down to a crawl over CPU. You'd think the browser would be smart about the stream selection though.

I run an extension that allows to automatically request h.264 streams from YouTube even when av1 is also available. Saves a lot of CPU, at the cost of some bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

#32
post #7

Sorry to hijack, but... I have weird issues with YouTube on my home PC. If I have a Chrome window with a YouTube video running to the side of my monitor, it always inevitably ends up freezing up the whole display. Ctrl+Alt+Delete and cancelling back in makes it go away briefly, however sometimes it can just keep freezing the monitor up constantly. The weird thing is, the PC (running Windows 11) has a powerful graphic…

Do you have an iGPU+dGPU combo like in a gaming laptop? For my 2019 gaming laptop with a i915+RTX2060, if I leave the switchable option on in the hardware settings (meaning the OS can choose which GPU to use ie. iGPU for low power), I end up with similar behavior in Linux/Win10. The external port actually uses the dGPU so rendering must go through it but it will struggle with the switchable option and I end up with freezing or stutters. In Linux, I explicitly configure Xorg to only use the iGPU and reserve the dGPU for model inference which fixes the stuttering issue. When booting into Win10, I explicitly disable the iGPU and turn off the external monitor so my VR playing doesn't stutter or youtube doesn't freeze or stutter.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

#37
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanlon's Razor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I’m sorry but big tech doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

The benefit of the doubt... that corps _don't_ write clunky, slow software?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

#39

If you have an adblocker it might be intentional.

That's not plausible. If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker." When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change. In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that…

It might be worth finding out what codec might be coming down the pipe in any case.
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