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Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

phoronix.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

#5

Post by replete »

Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet?

This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a quad core SoC that should have been able to handle it.

First thing I do on an SBC now is to see what resources are consumed playing back a 1080p youtube video.

Re: Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

#7

Post by ssl-3 »

replete wrote: post #5

Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet? This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a…

That depends on the video, too.

There's a bunch of different codecs in use with YouTube videos. Some of them are more intense than others to decode.

It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."

But it's really not that way even though it should be. Instead, we get a vaguely-meaningless way to coarsely change resolutions and codecs are selected by the man behind the curtain.

This problem is something that can be an issue even on x86 systems that otherwise performs very well for other every-day tasks.

Re: Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

#8

Post by porridgeraisin »

ssl-3 wrote: post #7
replete wrote: post #5

Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet? This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a…

That depends on the video, too. There's a bunch of different codecs in use with YouTube videos. Some of them are more intense than others to decode. It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that." But it's really not that way even though it should be. Instead, we get a vaguely-meaningless way to…

Extension can do that!

Enhanced h264ify or something let's you choose exactly the codec you want

Re: Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

#9

Post by gruez »

ssl-3 wrote: post #7
replete wrote: post #5

Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet? This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a…

That depends on the video, too. There's a bunch of different codecs in use with YouTube videos. Some of them are more intense than others to decode. It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that." But it's really not that way even though it should be. Instead, we get a vaguely-meaningless way to…

>It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."

No need for a user preference. There's an api that allows the site to query how well a given codec would work.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaCapabi...

Re: Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

#10

Post by walrus01 »

replete wrote: post #5

Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet? This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a…

my main problem with the raspberry pi 4 8GB as a desktop PC is that first, the 8GB model is not exactly "cheap", and by the time you add all the extra stuff needed to make it usable (power supply, case, heatsink, fan, good sized of quality microsd card, etc) it costs well above a hundred bucks...

And for $100 I can go to ebay and get a used dell small form factor desktop with a core i5-something quad core cpu, 16GB RAM, 160GB Intel SSD which will run circles around it in performance as a real linux desktop.

The only thing the rpi has going for it is tiny size and its I/O pins which aren't so relevant if your application is "i want a desktop that can capably play youtube videos"

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