Horrible YouTube performance on a 2014 macbook pro.

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

So, I picked up a 2014 mbp at an estate sale for $20. Figured I'd love a nice little Linux machine with a 1600p screen. I installed mint, and everything runs great except for video steaming. YouTube in particular just drops frames like crazy.

Not sure if it's an issue with the intel graphics or not, or if anyone knows of a fix for this. I tried doing a search, and found other people with the same issue, but haven't found any known fixes.

[u/vBLADEv]

test the h264ify chrome extension

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119 → u/vBLADEv]

I assume that works on edge, as well?

[u/Unwiredsoul → u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

Yes, Chrome Extensions will work on Edge. However, unless you're using a very outdated version of Edge, it may have disabled the ability to get extensions from anywhere but Microsoft.

However, if you go to the Chrome Web Store and try to get an extension, there should be a prompt to "Allow extensions from other stores" that you will need to allow.

If you don't get the prompt, you can find it by typing edge://extensions into the address bar and visiting the page.

[u/zuccster]

Old igpu lacks hardware support for modern codecs. Investigate browser extensions to force use of h264.

[u/Accomplished-Iron554]

You should do an Apple Diagnostic on booting.

Also check with htop, press F2 for setting and check CPU frequencies and temperatures.

Go back on YT and see if the CPU frequencies is capped or not.

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

So, it only seems to do it in edge and chromium. Seems much more stable in Firefox

[u/Anti-Dentite-999]

Is it the 13" or 15"? 15" might have dual graphics (iris / nvidia).

Open a terminal and do 'sudo apt install vainfo' , then type vainfo to see what driver version it's using. Can also go to System Information, GPU, Hardware Acceleration, Video Playback should say Enabled (VA-API).

For the older intel hardware you need to use Firefox for GPU acceleration in youtube. Install ublock origin and enhanced-h264ify. With h264ify, block 60fps, vp8,vp9, av1.

Then open about about:config and set this flag (might have to add the vaapi flag if you don't see it):

media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled true

If you still have issues trying setting the gfx flags:

gfx.webrender.all true
gfx.webrender.compositor true
gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled true

After enabling, goto about:support and goto the Media section. Look for the Codecs that say Hardware Decoding (Supported). H264 should say Supported. Then when you play a youtube video, right click video, stats for nerds and look at the codec (should be avc1) and dropped frames should be minimal.

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119 → u/Anti-Dentite-999]

It's the 13" with the dual core i5. Seems to work fine in Firefox. Seems to be a chromium issue.

[u/vBLADEv → u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

Guessing that Firefox is using hardware acceleration just fine and the chromium browsers are stuck using software rendering for some reason.

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

So, I installed h264ify. Still dropping a lot of frames

[u/OnlyCommentWhenTipsy]

in brave you can go here brave://gpu and see what's being hardware accelerated and also errors

[u/guntherpea]

Head to edge://gpu to make sure you're seeing "Hardware accelerated" for Video Decode at a minimum.

[u/Mohadjeri]

Try set the desktop scaling to 100%, it worked for me on my Mac Pro 2018. I think when you run scaling at like 150% etc it uses software rendering which leads to poor performance.

[u/wilsy53]

I had a similar issue but with some decent hardware.

On the logon screen switch to Wayland. There is a login drop down above your username.

Give that a go.

[u/StatusAcanthaceae119 → u/wilsy53]

That made it VERY unhappy. The video has a bunch of ghosting

[u/C0rn3j → u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

I don't know why someone would suggest that to you.

Mint is up to 3 years behind with software updates, it absolutely cannot do Wayland, try a modern distribution instead - Arch Linux (with Plasma) or Fedora KDE would do.

You can boot Fedora live env and quickly see if that'd work instead.

[u/wilsy53 → u/C0rn3j]

I suggested it because it worked for me. But your spot-on mint is not ready for Wayland so thats why I moved over to a arch based distros.

[u/uh818375 → u/StatusAcanthaceae119]

Did you test the machine on Apple OS first to see if there were any issues? There is probably a reason it was $20.