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Good Morning June 3, 2020 9:56 PM, "comrade meowski" <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 01/06/2020 21:43, rich@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> Just to add, I use Vivaldi as my browser, tonight I used Firefox on the second >> monitor and it had a >> slight hiccup but nothing more than a couple of seconds. Is there anyway of >> looking at my activity >> to see if Vivaldi is causing a problem please? > > Ok, after a quick look at this I have a definitive answer for you: > Vivaldi on Linux does NOT yet support hardware acceleration for > $reasons, none of which particularly make sense. Ignore the many > conflicting accounts online of people arguing about this exact subject: > they're all wrong, it doesn't work, Vivaldi haven't pulled the Chromium > VAAPI patches etc in from their upstream for some reason. Windows and > Mac are different. What might help is running this and reporting back > what happens: > > ghost@failbot:~$ sudo /opt/vivaldi/update-ffmpeg > Proprietary media codecs (80.0.3987.149) was already present > > You may have omitted installing Vivaldi's custom ffmpeg support package > in which case the command will fix that for you. If it's already > installed and you see the same result as mine, you're out of luck. > > To further explain: Vivaldi does not have hardware acceleration on Linux > so is falling back to software rendering. Surprisingly it seems that > your Lenovo T41 is too weak to handle that (which seems a bit suspicious > to be honest at the low resolutions you were trying) hence the terrible > results. Firefox on the other hand on your laptop seems to be modern > enough that WebRender hardware accelerated playback is available by > default and works just fine. > > A good test is here: > > https://help.vivaldi.com/article/html5-proprietary-media-on-linux > > Try to play back the embedded video in Vivaldi to see what happens. To > monitor your system, run any process monitoring tool of your choice and > start a demanding video up in Firefox and watch what happens. You'll see > a heavy spike of activity but hardware acceleration should keep it > stable and not too demanding. Try the same video in Vivaldi and see what > happens - even with the correct vivaldi-ffmpeg installed I predict > you'll see an enormous CPU spike compared to Firefox as your Lenovo > ramps up and fails to deal with the load. That's hardware offloading in > action for you. If you're not sure what monitoring tool to use I'd > suggest "htop" by the way. > > Part of the reason people seem so confused about this online (including > the Vivaldi devs whom to my surprise seem a bit thick quite frankly) is > that if you have a sufficiently powerful system even Linux Vivaldi will > work just fine with only software rendering - testing one of my > preferred YouTube 4K@60fps sample videos worked perfectly for example. > But that's only because my workstation's big ass Zen CPU had shot up to > 80% load on all cores. The same video on Firefox ran at approx 25% load > on all cores because the Nvidia GPU was picking up all the work. > > So your answer is as first suggested: Vivaldi is worthless for video > playback on Linux _unless_ you have a very powerful system and enjoy > wasting electricity unnecessarily. Use either Firefox or a > Chrome/Chromium with hardware acceleration enabled for the job. There > are a lot of left-field options still on the table as well though: > > 1: use youtube-dl to "rip" the videos locally to playback normally > 2: browser plugin to do the same > 3: browser plugins like h264ify to force more "friendly" codecs > 4: buy a cheap amazon firetv stick or similar for £20, stick that in the > monitor/TV and use that to do youtube/netflix/etc > > As usual you don't have a lot of options but to try them all and see > what works. > as usual an amazingly full and comprehensive reply. To answer some of your questions and thoughts: I already have the proprietary codecs installed: "Proprietary media codecs (79.0.3945.79) was already present" and can play the test video. I can play videos and Netflix fine in Vivaldi and did the test you suggested and immediately saw the huge spike. Does that explain why I can't play video on a second monitor then? I have already moved to playing all video content through Firefox and it manages playback on the second monitor perfectly. I already use youtube-dl but hadn't thought of using it for all youtube content but it would fail with Netflix. I always like to take the simplest of routes and will stick with the twin browser option. Thanks as ever for the feedback and suggestions. Enjoy the day. Rich -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq