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I just want the Manjaro Arm to not fizzle the gui's and run Firefox at speeds faster than 1980s era internet...
Or any desktop distro, even gnome or ubuntu
Huh. I use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a media center PC running Kodi / libreelec.. Literally all it does is play videos and music. Even 4k h.265. This meme makes no sense to me.
It struggles with vc1 though cause it can't hardware decode it
Yeah I can't speak to that as I don't have anything encoded in vc1. After a quick search I see that's a proprietary Microsoft codec so that's probably why I didn't encode anything with it.
Kodi / Libreelec are in the same vein as Android TV. There extremely neutered operating systems that can basically only do that one thing, so if they failed at it, well...
You can really edit documents, run YouTube with a decent UI, possibly use sponsor block, can't do video game streaming.
Actually, I take it back, Kodi etc are more limited than Android TV on the Pi, since at least that supports Steam Link and Moonlight streaming.
So yeah, like Android, it can play the video. But it can do anything else like if I were to run any actual distro.
Oh yeah it's totally an appliance OS built around Kodi and not a general purpose OS. I do use it to watch YouTube though. I'll "send to Kodi" from my phone and it plays on the TV. I use a full desktop computer for all the other stuff you mentioned. I only brought up Kodi on the raspi because this meme specifically calls out videos, which do work quite well (as long as it isn't a vc1 encode apparently).
Happens on fedora 💀 even on my x64_86 rig
The issue is trying to run a video in Firefox. Modern web browsers consume a lot of resources. Also they don't use your hardware efficiently for video playing. You need to take some time to set up a native video player application to play YouTube videos. This better uses the SBC hardware acceleration without wasting precious resources.
Use your operating systems software installer to Install the latest versions of smplayer, smtube, and mpv. Use smtube to select a YouTube video. This sends the network stream URL to smplayer which detects its a YouTube video and downloads the latest yt-dlp to help stream it. If everything is up to date, it plays great.
Not all OS keep their software up to date. Some prefer older stable packages. So its important to use a OS that keeps this software updated. I know for sure MX Linux works with its default software repos out of the box. Its available for Pis, though I have not personally installed on a PI.
Once you get YouTube videos playing, go into settings of smtube to change the web page from tonvid to a custom invidious instance. Pick one thats ideally from your country and that lets you register an account. That way you can import subscriptions and personalize stuff.
Hiccups when using smtube to load an invidious site: the default language will be some foreign language. Make sure you know how to go to settings in invidious and change to english. To load the video click on small youtube icon bottom right of video.
I have revived lots of old PCs over the years. Giving them a new lease on life with up to date linux operating systems for friends and family. I have a 15 year old laptop that was finally having a hard time running latest linux mint xfce. This week I got to work reviving it.
I gave mx linux a shot as I liked ExplainingComputers review of the OS and thought it good fit for my use case. Installing these programs right from MX's software repositiories was a breeze. Youtube played effortlessly! MX is pretty minimal and im sure most pis can run it okay, so give it a shot if you want a OS with up to date repos for these packages if youtube is one of your main concerns.
Very useful, I'll try this too.
Question though - I thought yt-dlp downloaded videos?
And can sponsor block be integrated into this in any way?
When you 'stream a video' from firefox it just downloads the video in small chunks at a time instead of the whole thing at once. These chunks of downloaded video are saved to temporary memory called a 'cache' and deleted after you are done the video.
Yes yt-dlp is most often used to download the entire video as a digital file onto permanent memory; however it doesn't have to be used that way. Other applications like smplayer and mpv can work with yt-dlp. Using it as a component to do the heavy lifting of talking to youtubes servers and streaming video in the same exact way firefox does.
Doing a quick search, there are some projects to implement mpv with sponsorblock. Im not the most technical person and prefer not to get my hands dirty with complex hacked together scripts that require compilation or whatever. Thats not to discourage you if you want to follow up on those things know people are working on it but if you aren't a power user it may be a hard time to get that kind of thing working.
That's extremely useful to know about yt-dlp.
I've only ever used it to download videos permanently fire offline viewing when traveling. I never knew it could work as a temp cache as well.
I'll probably make a comment linking comments here with good solutions soon.
Ask that's left is to figure out a decent IPTV program. Really liked Hypnotix but it seems it's just too much for the Pi
have you tried VLC? It works with IPTV if I am remembering right.
I didn't know VLC worked with IPTV. I'm guessing through plug in?
VLC was giving me issues too when playing video as well though, but only on some distros
More directions at iptv-orgs github
You should see a bunch of IPTV streams to choose from. Go to search bar located top right to search playlist for the stream you want. You can look for a more specific iptv-org playlist for your language and stuff. when commercial breaks happen it just shows a still frame. If nothing is playing right away try waiting a few minutes.
I hope all this has helped you out, Lumisal. I updated the formatting on my comments to closer resemble a guide in case you decide to link them in the future. Enjoy your open and energy efficient computing!