4K upscaled videos lag

Hi,
I have this problem too since I bought a 4k monitor.

Now I finally found a way of playing 4k videos from youtube full screen on the 4k monitor with no framedrop at all !

My Hardware

  • CPU : Xeon E5-1650 v4 3.6GHz (6 cores)
  • 64GB RAM
  • Graphic card > Radeon Pro WX 4100
  • 2 Monitors : 1 x 4k +1 x FHD

My way

Not sure if everything is really needed, but this way it works for me.

  1. My untrusted qube is based on debian-13-xfce template
  2. untrusted has access to 6 cores (might not be necessary, mpv uses 300% cpu while playing) and 10GB of RAM (might also work with far less, mpv +Xorg use around 1GB RAM while playing). untrusted is allowed to fullscreen in the qubes settings
  3. Install freetube from https://freetubeapp.io/ (I only use it because it integrates a button to play on external player directly)
  4. Install smplayer : apt install smplayer (but it looks like it uses mpv in the background)
  5. In the freetube settings, configure external Player to smplayer
  6. Open smplayer, go to the settings and change the following :
  • General → Video → output driver → x11
  • I enabled direct rendering Not sure if it really brings something
  • Performance → I checked Allow frame drop (so I can get the statistics of frame dropped with Shift + I)
  • Performance → Threads for decoding : I set to 6 (numbers of cores I have)
  • Network → Youtube → support for video sites = Internal Youtube support
  • Options for youtube : Playback quality = 4K + use adaptive streams + use 60fps if available + allow av1 codec

For some reasons, smplayer only goes real full screen with Alt+F11 and then f
shift + I shows the stats and on my setup it works with 30 fps with no frame drop.

If I choose in the youtube options of smplayer to use mpv instead of Internal Youtube support it is laggy with frame drops. So It might be something there to check

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