Hi everyone,
Ive been running the x11 launcher on my OSMC so that I can use Chromium for browsing.
Before i did a ‘sudo apt update’ the playback was acceptable, but now it is flickering and pausing. A YouTube video will only work in a low resolution and if the video is not full screen.
Is there any way at all to improve the video playback?
A Raspberry Pi4 8GB should be more than capable of handling it.
It has been mentioned more then once in x11 thread, that hw acceleration will not be actively worked on.
Multiple reasons, there is no easy attainable drivers for the diversity of hardware for OSMC.
Time to expand the project further has been limited, to compile chromium for OSMC took about 36 hours on my old laptop, haven’t tried with my new one, but i’m still ram limited for such a big compile.
So I more then welcome user contributions, as in drivers or chromium(with acceleration) packaged in .deb format, multiple debs for hardware platforms is a solution. But to much work for me right now.
Ideas, check PiOS for Xserver patches and drivers…
Thank you for getting back to me joakim_s.
Your contribution with the x11 launcher for OSMC has been valuable to me.
I can still make good use of it… I was able to install Firefox ESR and I use that for Fender Play (guitar lessons).
As long as the video isn’t full screen, it is usable… not 100% smooth but good enough.
I don’t have the I.T. knowledge to understand why, but Fender Play runs worse in Chromium.
But YouTube is even worse still in Firefox than it was in Chromium.
For simply watching YouTube videos the Kodi add-on is the way to go. It’s a complicated process to get it to work, but there are good tutorials online to walk you through it.
It will be a big learning curve for me to ‘fix’ Chromium… maybe one day I will be able to do it.
I believe Pi moved to Firefox because they had issues with Chrome forcing advertising. Even Chromium now have these restrictions…
@sam_nazarko Recently I’ve gone back to running the RPi4 on Pi OS, but this time it is the ‘Bullseye’ 64 bit version.
YouTube runs sweet as in Chromium but Fender Play is a little rough.
I also installed Firefox ESR and Fender Play works well on that browser… YouTube not so well.
Its no biggy, I simply use the appropriate browser depending on what I want to do.
Bullseye uses Kodi Matrix where the old Buster OS only supported Leia.
I can now install the add ons which wouldn’t work in Leia (the reason I resorted to using OSMC in the first place).
As always with the Pi there is something not quite right. Kodi on Bullseye does not support WideVine streaming meaning that some on demand videos from add ons like 7plus and 9now won’t play.
This month the new Pi5 is being released along with a new OS, Bookworm.
MAYBE the widevine issue will be resolved, who knows.
As you already said, Firefox is going to be the default browser from now on.
Widevine won’t change. Pi has not licensed it. They don’t have the security model to do so (lack of persistent storage).
I speak to the Pi guys a lot, and they highlighted the issue with ads and Google Chrome/Chromium themselves.