Why does video playback of YouTube judder but on windows its smooth? It makes it seem like Linux is badly coded but I’m sure it can’t be that.
Haven’t checked in a couple years, but I doubt it’s changed. Short answer is no browser on Linux does GPU decoding of videos from YT or similar sites. Combined with Purism’s aging and lackluster CPU, performance on that is poor.
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Could you give a URL that exhibits the problem? Then we can test in various different environments and perhaps answer the question. That may also provide information regarding video resolution and codec etc.
As it happens, the computer I am sitting on at the moment has the exact same CPU (and graphics) that is in the Purism laptops and I have no problem with judder.
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Here is one of them. I never watch anything in full HD 1080p but that’s also in windows which has smooth playback. My system:
i7 3770k 3.5ghz onboard graphics hd4000
15.5 GB ddr3 1600
120gb ssd data 3 ahci
Asrock z77 fatal1ty professional.
This is just one example.
Maybe the phone-home “telemetry” on Windows is filling the gaps in the packets? So you don’t notice the “judder”.
(This is a joke you don’t have to answer this.)
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who cares about snooptube - just download the videos directly from > https://lbry.tv/ . imo if it doesn’t have a GUI for a download button for offline viewing (with VLC maybe 
) then it’s probably not worth your time …
OSV doesn’t have a channel on there. . . .I could always try offliberty
you could try suggesting that they create one … maybe they don’t know about it ?
As mush as I hate google the general public couldn’t care less about his it operates. That will be an uphill struggle.
we ARE the hill … 
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This video plays very smoothly for me in both Firefox and Brave. I have a Librem 13v4 running Fedora Workstation 31. At 1080p fullscreen, CPU usage is 50% or less.
However, I notice that streaming it at 1080p eats up about 60 Mbps of network bandwidth. At 720p it’s about 50 Mbps. Perhaps your problem is your Internet connection can’t keep up?
Try downloading the video with youtube-dl and playing it back with VLC or your favorite video app. If that runs smoothly then your computer/OS are not the problem.
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LOL. I just get the profoundly unhelpful message (from YouTube?) “An error occurred. Please try again later.”. However this is happening for all YouTube videos that I try at random, whereas it was working fine yesterday when I tested it on a couple of videos. I’ll “try again later”. 
Adding:
OK one browser restart later … all is fine.
I only watched the first 6 minutes of the video but it was fine. No judder. That was watching as a video embedded within this forum since that is how it was formatted by the forum software but that means only 360p. So I grabbed the URL and watched it in another tab at 720p HD. Also fine. No judder.
i7-7500U (with Intel integrated graphics HD 620) i.e. reasonable but nothing special - displaying on FHD monitor (1920x1080 @ 60Hz). Firefox / Ubuntu (both pretty much latest).
You sure about that number?? I have the slowest internet connection on the planet (Hint: technology not even capable of 50 Mbps) and I was able to watch the 720p video. I would say it was downloading a little over 3 Mbps (eyeballing my gkrellm window).
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So I downloaded it from offliberty, 720x1280 at 25fps. Playing it pure browser and videos app reveals the same stuttering. I’m sure its because its 25fps on a 60hz PC an a 120hz tv. But it doesn’t happen on windows 10 with the same hardware.
So you are using PureOS?
Can you try Ubuntu + Firefox? (Ubuntu LiveBoot so that you don’t have to install anything.)
Oops. The bandwidth numbers I gave are indeed bogus; they’re based on the short burst speeds intermittently occurring on my connection during the streaming. The actual sustained bandwidth for the 1080p stream is more like 2 Mbps.
I recall if you’re using DuckDuckGo to search for a video and find one, it will ask if you want to “View it Here” or on “YouTube”.
make sure you have ENOUGH free space on the drive and maybe see to it that you haven’t run out of inodes (can happen if you have everything configured to use very large blocks - more than 4mb)
120gb is very small if you also store stuff on it not just boot off it …
I’ve no idea what an inode is. I’m using around 20GB of the ssd, all valuable data is on a large HDD.
Yeah I’m using pureOS, I’ll try Ubuntu tomorrow and let you know.
Perhaps under Linux the video out is limited to 30 fps. That would explain why the video looks choppy. Since 30 is not an integer multiple of 25 (and neither is 60), some frames must be displayed twice and that results in visible stutter - especially visible when camera is panning left or right. When having true 60 fps, the duplication of frames can be done much smoother - the player can display some frames twice and some frames thrice to strech 25 up to 60, whereas when having only 30fps , it has to display most frames once and eveery fifth frame twice, which results in annoying very visible stutter 5 times per second.
Do you have the option of trying 30 fps video?
Can you try lower desktop resolution in attempt to regain true 60fps video output?