zero youtube video performance (Debian9+Xfce4+Iceweasel)

[v47]

Hello, I have a 32bit atom based system with just the very core Debian install plus Xfce4 and Iceweasel, and am experiencing horrible performance when playing youtube videos (about one frame a minute). They play just fine under Chromium, or Firefox (Xubuntu live cd).

Any suggestions? Thank you.

[stevepusser]

Do you really have Iceweasel? That's in the Stretch repository only as a dummy transitional package that pulls in firefox-esr.

[v47]

apt install xfce4 iceweasel is what I used, so I have whatever that pulled onto the machine.

[debiman]

Hello, I have a 32bit atom based system

so have i, and no matter how lightweight the linux distro, you can't watch flash (or html5) video with it.
use mpv (with youtube-dl as plugin) to watch online videos.

[v47]

as mentioned in the first post, they play decently under chromium and xubuntu firefox, but making them run with identical performance under iceweasel would be preferable.

[stevepusser]

As previously stated, you are really using firefox-esr. Iceweasel is just a dummy package that pulled in firefox-esr; it was used to make the transition from iceweasel to firefox-esr happen automatically. You can in fact remove it now, and it will leave firefox-esr installed. You can also confirm you are using Firefox instead of Iceweasel by checking the "About" dialog in your browser, or just typing "about:" in the address box.

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/iceweasel

A common troubleshooting practice is to start the program from a terminal, in this case use "firefox", and see if any error messages appear when you try to play the videos. Perhaps you don't have one or more of the gstreamer1.0 packages that it needs for playback.

You might also consider Pale Moon on your low-powered machine. It's lighter than Firefox, and has switched to using ffmpeg libraries directly for embedded video playback, something that I think is still in the works for Firefox. There's even a third-party repository for it, maintained by yours truly .

[v47]

ok, will try as soon as I have access to the machine again. palemoon sounds interesting - what is its storage footprint? it needs to be smaller than chromium (the machine has a tiny integrated ssd, and the entire reason why I won't simply stick with chromium is that debian+xfce+chromium leaves about 100MB of free space, a bit too tight for comfort. iceweasel, sorry firefox esr is about 100 more megs lighter so that would do ok, but I absolutely need this machine to play youtube videos).

[Bulkley]

What is nice about Palemoon is that you don't actually have to install it to your root system. Instead you can download the tar ball as a user, open it and run Palemoon locally. It runs perfectly in your user account.

BTW, there is a VLC browser plugin which might solve your Firefox problem.

[stevepusser]

Pale Moon is smaller than Chromium and Firefox, since it has some stuff from Firefox stripped out that the developers don't think is necessary. But you then need to add libav-tools or ffmpeg to enable the Youtube playback, but I still don't think that it would be as big as Firefox or Chromium.

The 64-bit repo build of Pale Moon takes up 103 MB on my system.

Probably the most efficient way to play videos on an older system would be to use something like SMTube It doesn't really seem updated in Stretch, being 15.5.10, but you can use the developer's packages, or the ones I maintain in viewtopic.php?f=6&t=127574

Or you could use something like youtube-dlg (just added) or clipgrab to download the videos and watch them later, though with limited storage space, you may have to find somewhere to put them. Do you have much in your apt archive? Maybe

Code: Select all

apt-get clean

can free up some space by deleting them.

[v47]

sounds good, I'll get on it asap (this weekend).

[v47]

ok, so the easiest thing to do is to install chromium and run apt-get clean afterwards - this will leave the system with almost 350MB of free space, which is enough for the intended basic operation (I did omit system utilities as well while installing, as I really don't need anything besides a working browser, screen resolution control and audio panel, and those things seem to work just fine even without them).

I would like to have a look at Palemoon anyway, but it seems like it cannot be installed via apt-get? guess I'll find out about running *.sh files in linux environments soon enough.

[stevepusser]

I maintain an apt repository for Pale Moon on the OpenSUSE Build Service (free to use for anyone, I have quite a few repos on it now)

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... r/palemoon

Instructions to add the Stretch repo and its key: (sudo users can become root with "sudo -i")

As root, add the repo:

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echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/stevenpusser/Debian_9.0/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/palemoon.list

Download the key as a regular user:

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rm -f Release.key

wget -nv http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:stevenpusser/Debian_9.0/Release.key -O Release.key


As root, add the key to your key database, update apt, and install palemoon:

Code: Select all

apt-key add - < Release.key

apt-get update

apt-get install palemoon

[v47]

allright, so Palemoon is about 100MB lighter than Chromium on this system, but youtube performance is unsatisfactory - not null/zero like in Firefox (Palemoon 360p is almost watchable), but definitely worse than Chromium (480p is fully watchable, I'm thinking the browser is able to run it on the gpu). so Chromium it is, at least for now.

one way or another, thanks for all the help, it was great fun trying out all the stuff.