Floatplane vs Youtube cpu usage

Omegasamurai · August 8, 2019

Hey guys,

Something interesting just struck me.. I have a Dell XPS 13 from a few years back with an i5-5200 in it, and I've noticed over the years that it really chugs when trying to stream/play video in certain cases, particularly 4k youtube.

This is a big shame, cuz it has a really nice, if non-standard, high resolution display. However, I just took the leap today and went to Floatplane, and in watching a few videos at 1080p I didn't have any of those problems. I've heard that the way floatplane handles video means that even at 1080p the quality is better than 4k youtube, and I agree it looks really nice, but why does youtube smash the cpu so hard while floatplane does not?

I ask this entirely out of curiosity.. I know next to nothing about how video processing and different codecs and all that works. To me, it's like "same # of pixels same framerate = same", but I know that's not right.

Electronics Wizardy · August 8, 2019

What codec is youtube using? IDK about floatplane, but youtube is really pushing open codecs now, like vp9 and av1 which don't require a license to use. There normally not gpu accelerated, esp on older gpus so the cpu does the work. The good part is that these codecs are normally better than the old standard of h264 so you get better quality or less network usage.