Poor performance for video calls in Pure Browser

Software PureOS
1

Hi,

I have tried google hangouts and appear.in.

Both have really bad lag on a connection that is 40Mbs via speedtest.net.

My CPU monitor reports the CPU is being throttled and the fans spin up to full.

Has anyone seen this before, or know if it’s Pure Browser. On my other XPS laptop which is worse specs than my librem 13v4 it runs fine in firefox?

Many thanks,

Adam

2

I haven’t seen that, but I don’t use appear.in or hangouts I’m afraid. Just to confirm, you’re using PureBrowser correct? That is essentially Firefox so it should have the same performance.

1 Like
3

Perhaps check whether hardware acceleration is happening, what graphics driver you are using, what specific video software is being used on those sites.

Perhaps those sites list “system requirements” that may shed light on what they need in order to work well.

Perhaps check whether there are any settings for the quality of the video call that can be dialled down if no other (better) solution emerges.

2 Likes
4

Hi there,

The Purism laptop is far superior to my Dell XPS, so i can’t see it being the hardware.

However how would i check if hardware acceleration is happening?

Adam

5

Firefox setting - if that is relevant to how the video is being played.

e.g. https://cialu.net/enable-hardware-acceleration-firefox-make-faster/

6

PureOS should disclose to future purchasers that hardware acceleration is not supported.

I enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled and my 15" pureos and it still requires 100% cpu to watch youtube videos.

I can no longer recommend the laptop that I otherwise love. I preload all the videos I’m going to watch in tabs to avoid google forcing their recommended Leftist videos. However, when a video is playing, the laptop is slugish.
If you accidently start a 2nd video, everything freezes.

I tried chromium. It won’t accelerate videos either.

1 Like
7

I can assure you I can watch all sorts of HD videos, youtube or elsewhere, without high CPU load.
However, as I was not pleased with the performance of PureBrowser, I switched to Brave (see Brave HowTo) long ago.
Maybe Brave has some bits that Chromium lacks?

8

thank you for the quick reply. I abandoned brave when I was unable to get sync working across all my devices. It’s been a while. I guess I’ll have to try brave again.