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Youtube has been turning on AV1 for 1080p content for me. My phone is the only device with an AV1 hardware decoder. The impact on battery life and CPU usage has been extreme. You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos ( https://www.youtube.com/account_playback ) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported. Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume eq…
Well, is it higher or lower?
Youtube has been turning on AV1 for 1080p content for me. My phone is the only device with an AV1 hardware decoder. The impact on battery life and CPU usage has been extreme. You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos ( https://www.youtube.com/account_playback ) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported. Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume eq…
> impact on battery life and CPU Well, is it higher or lower?
Have only noticed this on my Windows machine, not any of my Macs. The windows machine has enough horsepower to use most of it's 2000w power supply, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. Using firefox engine & an adblocker fwiw.
My PC plays videos just fine, but it started sucking down 50W more than it used to, and AV1 was the culprit. Now that I've switched YT back to hardware-accelerated h264 playback, everything is back to normal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity. We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits fo…
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine didn't say anything about psychology. But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled." That makes sense as a strat…
Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.
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 believe Youtube's player is driving codec selection, not the browser (i.e. the player requests a list of supported codecs and then picks the one most beneficial for Google, not the other way around). That said, I've solved this problem for myself on macOS and Firefox by setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config, as all other codecs used by Youtube are hardware accelerated on my Mac.
The way the browser can still participate in choosing is by e.g. not listing AV1 as supported when there is no hardware decoder on the local system. Both Safari and Edge took (approximately) that style of approach, but it comes with the downside that if the server only has AV1 video then the client gets nothing.
Practically, that downside isn't a big deal until codec support is high enough sites start assuming the codec is just supported and they don't need to host alternative options.
Once you carefully whitelist the resource it wants the CPU usage goes down again. At least that fixed it for me (I was mistakenly checking various codec related settings in Firefox first too to find a solution.)
This started happening on one of my older computers recently and I had to actually disable hardware acceleration to get the audio to stop being out of sync. The tradeoff for that has been noticeable frame dropping. I even added an extension to force h264 but there's no difference. It can play video no problem on other sites or in VLC. It's just YouTube and just on that PC...That PC can run Doom Eternal. Video content…
I can imagine that your older computer might have native support for decoding the high-res h264 video, but not for the high-quality OPUS audio stream, causing them to decode at different speeds.
I don't think there's a solution to that problem that doesn't involve running a dedicated video player such as VLC.
That said, I've also heard a lot of complaints from people still using Adblock Plus. I don't know what rules ABP has implemented, but they seem to affect Youtube performance much worse than uBlock whenever Youtube changes something.
Also happens with Github and anything that uses ads lately. A 2 core PC dies while trying to render those pages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're sabotaging non-Chrome browsers to drive people toward their platform with the strategically weakened extension API.
I don't think that has any connection to the subject under discussion, which is about whether YouTube CPU performance would lead people to turn off adblockers. Not about getting people to switch to Chrome.