[zahlman]

> The Pi 2 managed to open the browser and actually started playing back a 1080P video, which was surprising, but playback was terrible.

A Youtube tab, web browser modern enough for YouTube, and OS modern enough for that web browser, all fit in 1GB of memory? Wow.

[encom]

Worth noting: A Pi 1 will decode 1080p h264 video flawlessly. I used one as a media center for a long time, running OpenELEC (now LibreELEC). Moving around the UI was a bit sluggish, but video playback was smooth.

YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose. I use Newpipe on an older (but not that old) tablet. Whenever Google breaks Newpipe and I have to use a browser, it takes like 30 seconds just to load the page.

Decoding video is trivial when you have hardware decoders.

[MBCook]

Are they even pushing H264 to the pi? Or is this more of their “you’ll take WebP and like it” stuff.

[andai]

I had this on my old laptop too, it would really struggle with HD YouTube, but if I copy pasted the url into VLC or MPV it would play just fine.

[Mr_Minderbinder]

> YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose.

Exactly, which is why I thought this was a terrible and meaningless benchmark. It completely obfuscates the actual video playback performance of these machines. It is more a measure of how awful and inefficient YouTube is. I am surprised that the author did not remark on or seem to be aware of this at all.

[zahlman]

... Pis have hardware video decoders? I thought they were just fairly generic CPUs.

[ThatPlayer]

The original CPU was designed for set top boxes by Broadcom.