How to make Youtube less CPU-intensive?

Pawnless Endgame · 8 Aug 2015 at 00:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I'm currently working with a 2007-spec laptop.

It'll play no probs:

- 1080p BBC iPlayer
- 1080p MP4s, FLVs, AVIs etc
- 1080p SWFs

Hell, it even plays blu-rays using an external drive without stuttering!

Youtube, however, just cains the CPU, forcing me to download the videos to a local drive, then play ok in Media Player Classic. Any idea on how to make Youtube 'lighter' considering that iPlayer / blu-rays play without interruptions?

gpuerrilla · 8 Aug 2015 at 00:48

Have you got hardware acceleration enabled in your browser?

p5ychonaut · 8 Aug 2015 at 01:41

The problem may be down to the Youtube HTML5 player using the VP9 codec which is not hardware accelerated on many GPUs - especially not those as old as 2007. The GPU should be able to decode h264 judging by performance you have observed playing videos on other sites.

The solution is to either use a browser which does not support VP9 (IE, Edge, possibly others) or, in the case of Chrome, use the h264ify extension (in the Chrome store) which will force the browser to use a h264 encoded stream instead of VP9.

bledd · 8 Aug 2015 at 09:53

Best suggestion is try all 3 browsers..

Probably down to a poor GPU

Pawnless Endgame · 8 Aug 2015 at 12:52

Thanks! I forgot that Youtube now uses HTML5 instead of Flash, which explains why Flash etc is still ok on my lappy. Indeed the GPU is just onboard Intel fluff :-)

The pre-installed Internet Exploder 7 gave me surprisingly good results (!), so thanks again guys. Will stick with Firefox 39 for everything else though.

opethdisciple · 8 Aug 2015 at 18:43

Try Chrome. It's more CPU efficient than Firefox.

Better multi-core processing compared to Firefox's poor multi process support.

Caged · 8 Aug 2015 at 20:05

IE does HTML5 video really well.