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Notes -
This is so dumb. So five minutes after claiming 8th gen Intel will be fine for general browsing for a long time yet, I notice high CPU use watching a YouTube video, in all browsers. Go over Vivaldi:GPU with a fine tooth comb to see what went wrong. Triple check everything's running on the right GPU...
And then it turns out YouTube just stopped honoring my "please don't use av1" setting without telling me. Bitch you could just ask my browser if I have hardware support for your fancy codec.
God why is everything so janky. I need a browser extension to use the same YouTube account on PC and phone, because there's no setting for "please only use av1 on devices that support it, and no the 6 year old laptop can't even though the phone can"
Cynically YouTube doesn't give a shit, because forcing av1 saves them bandwidth and most consumers won't make the connection between their noisy computer fan and playing YouTube videos.
I thought it was just my PC being old but my recent experiences of YouTube making my PC sounds like it wants to take off combined with this comment suggesting that it's not just my PC has inspired me to move over to a desktop YouTube client. I've chosen FreeTube because it comes with ad block, SponsorBlock and ("most") age verified videos enabled. Seems alright so far.
Check your GPU in the task manager "resources" tab while YouTube is playing, and right click the video to show "stats for nerds."
You'll probably see either vp9 or av01 under "codec".
If you see "video decode" being used in task manager, you have hardware acceleration for that codec. If you see high CPU use and only "3d rendering" being used on the GPU graph, you don't.
You won't get hardware accel for av1 on an old PC (Intel 10th gen or older), and it's really hard on the cpu. Try to turn it off in settings or with a browser addon.
If you have a vp9 video but hardware accel isn't working, you either have a really old PC (intel 6th gen or lower), or one of a list of problems:
*Browser isn't set to support hardware accel. Chrome is especially bad for this out of the box. Your standalone YouTube player is gonna be a good fix for this one.
*Browser running on an old GPU (GTX 9xx or lower, or an AMD from before 2018, because they added support stupidly late). This is why I have to set my browser to run from igpu instead.
*You sacrificed the wrong breed of goat while dedicating your PC to Satan, and the hardware is now cursed.
Helpful tips, thanks. I've added on an addon to block av1 and it's made an improvement but I'm on a 2012 AMD processor with internal Radeon 6550HD graphics so can't expect much, however watching videos is typically the most intensive usage it outside of pending updates for Firefox. What is that about anyway? Until recently the fans revving up would almost always be a sign that Firefox was getting impatient to update and it would settle down again after restarting.
In addition to the matters SteveKirk brings up, I'd check what resolution YouTube is streaming at. There's been some changes in the last few months resetting default resolution values, and it'll quite often favor resolution values that you neither need nor want on many systems. 480p or even 360p is a lot easier on your processor and bandwidth if you're not reading text or looking at fine details of the video.
I stick to 480p on YouTube as I've no need for higher resolution. I'm not motivated enough to drill down into the technical aspects but it definitely seems that the problem is worse or at least only noticeable on YouTube. Other video sites don't seem to cause the same problems even at higher resolutions.
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