Playing YouTube on RPi4B with task-gnome-desktop

[Ryutaroh Matsumoto]

Dear Debian ARM users,

As Bullseye almost frozen, I have seen if I can play YouTube video on
my RPi4B 8GB. It was essentially a success with some tricks as follows:

(1) 5GHz WiFi becomes unusable with firmware-brcm80211 version 20210208-1 and newer,
as reported #985632. 2.4GHz WiFi works fine even with Bluetooth (resolved #984844).

(2) task-gnome-desktop is installed.

(3) Pulseaudio does not work with ALSA sinks brought by vc4.ko, e.g. in
#!/bin/sh
set -x
while true; do
systemctl --user status pulseaudio
pacmd list-sinks
pacmd exit
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio
done
every command gets stuck or fails (#985928). A workaround is preventing
pulseaudio from touching the ALSA sinks brought by vc4.ko. In /etc/pulse/default.pa
(3-1) Comment out "load-module module-udev-detect" and
"load-module module-detect".
(3-2) Add "load-module module-alsa-card device_id=2" assuming snd_bcm2835 has
device ID 2 in /proc/asound/cards.

In the following, Firefix-ESR Wayland in Bullseye with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
in the enviroment variables is assumed. Gnome Wayland session is also assumed.

(4) A YouTube video

can played by the Firefox ESR
Wayland with some drop of frames and some degradation of textures. Audio is
fine with HDMI output. Load average is above 7.

(5) With the weston session, the frame drop and texture degradation decrease and
the load average decreases below 4.

(*) Firefox (ESR) with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 does not work at all on
Gnome Wayland and Weston sessions on the Raspberry Pi OS
as v3d.ko does not support Wayland. I wonder how Ubuntu RasPi
team will handle it (or simply dropping support of Wayland as Raspberry Pi OS does).

I hope this being somewhat interesting to the list members...

Best regards, Ryutaroh Matsumoto

[Ryutaroh Matsumoto]

Post by Ryutaroh Matsumoto
(5) With the weston session, the frame drop and texture degradation decrease and
the load average decreases below 4.

On the same hardware, task-xfce-desktop seems to give even smoother
video playing with YouTube than the weston. I wonder if a promise by
Wayland is less overhead than the conventional X server...
Memory footprints are almost the same between weston and Xfce
(1 GB of all the processes and 1GB of buffer cache).

Best regards, Ryutaroh

[Ryutaroh Matsumoto]

Hi all,

There was a debate on running 32-bit kernel on 64-bit ARM CPU.
As my purely subjective experience, playing the same YouTube video
on 32-bit kernel on RPi4B 8GB has 0.5 to 1 higher load average and
15 to 30% less CPU idle time than 64-bit kernel, according to "top".
vc4.ko was used with both kernels and Xfce4 desktop was used.
For playing YouTube by firefox, 64-bit kernel seems more suitable
than 32-bit.

Exact kernel compilation options for 32- and 64-bit kernels are
https://github.com/emojifreak/debian-rpi-image-script/blob/main/build-raspi-kernel.sh

Best regards, Ryutaroh Matsumoto

From: Ryutaroh Matsumoto <***@ict.e.titech.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: Playing YouTube on RPi4B with task-gnome-desktop
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 12:21:42 +0900 (JST)

Post by Ryutaroh Matsumoto

Post by Ryutaroh Matsumoto
(5) With the weston session, the frame drop and texture degradation decrease and
the load average decreases below 4.

On the same hardware, task-xfce-desktop seems to give even smoother
video playing with YouTube than the weston. I wonder if a promise by
Wayland is less overhead than the conventional X server...
Memory footprints are almost the same between weston and Xfce
(1 GB of all the processes and 1GB of buffer cache).
Best regards, Ryutaroh