Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 133 posts

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

#61

Post by alex_duf »

ryandrake wrote: post #57
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny that this kind of browser extension has recurred over the years. Originally it was to replace the awful CPU hog flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player[1], then it was to sidestep YouTube’s insistence on VP* codecs, and now it’s to sidestep AV1. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110302145602/http://www.vertic...

In a beautiful world, there would be a link to each codec to let the user decide, or the browser itself would override the web site's preference and provide such links. It's sad that we keep having to resort to browser extensions to circumvent terrible web site and browser software.

I guess in a beautiful world we'd have hardware accelerated, patent free codecs.

Which is almost what AV1 is, native hardware decoding is slowly slowly progressing

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

#62

Post by ndriscoll »

hedora wrote: post #52
gatane wrote: post #28

Also happens with Github and anything that uses ads lately. A 2 core PC dies while trying to render those pages.

I wonder if it’s proof of work bullshit. For those to be effective, they have to slow down whatever machine is running in an LLM farm. That generally means they have to peg a desktop GPU for long enough to make a dent larger than LLM inference time. Browsing with a 2 core box is like using a musket to blow a hole in a wall that’s optimized for armor piercing rounds. Is this dumb? Of course. Your best recourse is prob…

That makes no sense. You require PoW before providing the information, not when the page is already sent. For a large code repository like GitHub for LLM training, it's also trivial to just git fetch to scrape. The simpler explanation is that modern web devs are frequently incompetent and can't get static text to appear on an idle page without pegging cores, can't get subsecond server page generation for simple CRUD, etc. This was the trend before LLMs were ever a thing.

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

#63

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

crazygringo wrote: post #53
hedora wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. They’ve done crap like make firefox or safari run hot on other Google properties in the past. Is it incompetence or sabotage? Who knows. The first rule of sabotage is to be indistinguishable from incompetence. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

Incompetence is by definition not intentional, and sabotage is the action of a rogue employee, not corporate strategy. A corporation can't intentionally sabotage itself , by definition.

They're sabotaging non-Chrome browsers to drive people toward their platform with the strategically weakened extension API.

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

#64

Post by jamesnorden »

vdnkh wrote: post #58
RisingFusion wrote: post #4

If you have an adblocker it might be intentional.

I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like: - Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in - Constantly tearing down and remaking the player - During an…

None of what you're mentioning applies to uBlock interacting with YouTube, I suspect you're talking about Twitch, which bakes the ad breaks into the stream so you still get the stream interrupted even you manage to block the ads, making people resort to hacky things like using the homepage player when an ad would be played.

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

#66

Post by jamesnorden »

mwkaufma wrote: post #37
ses1984 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When the supposed to bug happens to conveniently cause issues for adblocker users, yeah.

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

#67

Post by cwillu »

jsheard wrote: post #45
camhart wrote: 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.

That's intentional on YouTubes end, they aim to serve more bitrate-efficient codecs wherever possible, even if it's a high burden on the client due to a lack of hardware acceleration. They'll only fall back to older codecs if the client is completely incapable of handling the modern ones. It's annoying but at their scale it no doubt saves them a shitload of bandwidth.

Classic externality: at their scale, the power costs offloaded to their clients will also be enormous.

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

#68

Post by iLemming »

Somewhat relevant: can somebody share good mpv defaults (or some other interesting technique) for playing YT videos? I have managed to get it to work, but it still pauses a lot for bufferring. I wonder if there's maybe some yt-dlp, ffmpeg, etc. trick to pre-cache some segments or something like that. The reason to play it in mpv is not to avoid commercials (I have a paid account), but because I can then play it from my editor while fully controlling the playback - it works great for watching lectures and taking notes.

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

#70

Post by yonatan8070 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #60
yonatan8070 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the name of the addon? I recall h264ify but not sure about it

Yep, that's what I use. It took youtube from using 100% cpu, to the point where my little xps13 was thermal throttling, to 50% cpu running 1080p at 2-3x speed.

Out of curiousity, what CPU do you have in that XPS 13?
Post reply on HN