Why am I dropping frames so bad on videos?

User Support
1

Qubes 4.2.2. I have a laptop with an i9-10885h. Plenty powerful enough to play a video. Yet if I try to play a full screen 480p video it drops ~70% of my frames according to YouTube stats for nerds. If I play the video in small enough size it doesn’t drop near as many or even any frames. But too small for me to enjoy/ise. Things I’ve tried

  • Using fedora or Debian template
  • watching videos on VLC offline
  • assigning 16gb of RAM and 12 VCPUs

Things I haven’t tried but I’ve seen as a possibility

  • using something other than Firefox esr
  • using mpv according to this guide. I did try this but don’t think I did it correct. When I install mpv it doesn’t create a mpv.conf file (or an input.conf file, which I think is supposed to exist.) I tried creating a new mpv.conf file with only the content from the guide, but still dropping frames. If anyone can share the contents of their mpv.conf (and input.conf if necessary) that would be much appreciated. I couldn’t find it online and don’t want to dig out an RPi or something to try on a regular bare metal boot.

Anyways, any other ideas how to fix my lag? I have Nvidia hardware in my laptop, but I wouldn’t think that would be my issue. Thanks!

Edit: fixed VLC with solene’s fix below. Still having trouble with videos in browsers. Tried chrome and using piped.video

2

Did you have frame drops in VLC in a qube with 12 VCPUs?

With Chromium-based browser YouTube works better compared to Firefox.

3

I found a setting change in VLC that improves a lot decoding, but as it is done 100% software it will always be inefficient anyway: VLC video playback CPU usage improvement

However with this VLC change my i7-1260P is able to decode a 1080p x265 video with a single core at 30% load, which is not that bad.

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4

You need to disable “ambient mode” in the YouTube video options menu

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5

… and maybe loudness/voice compression, live comments and all those „cinematic“ fancy pants.

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6

I got VLC working with solene’s comment but still no luck with YouTube. I’ve tried chromium with same results. I did try watching on piped.video and I think that actually does help, but still dropping ~30% frames. I’ve turned off all ambient mode and other bloat I can turn off.
And yes the frames still dropped even with 12 VCPUs before solene’s fix. But using xl vcpu-list I could see that I was only ever using 2-3 VCPUs

7

Watching online videos in anything other than Brave browser is painful regardless of the hardware, when I was.

8

I have a modern, but not the newest hardware and this is huge… I feel like it’s day and night. I always need to resize the window otherwise it’s unwatchable.