I just want the Manjaro Arm to not fizzle the gui’s and run Firefox at speeds faster than 1980s era internet…

Or any desktop distro, even gnome or ubuntu

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    The issue is trying to run a video in firefox. Web browsers consume a lot of resources and don’t use hardware efficently for stuff like video playing. Instead you need to take some time and figure out how to use a native video player application which better uses the SBC hardware.

    Its important to me to be able to conserve system resources. I have revived lots of old PCs new over the years to run up to date operating systems for friends and family. I am also a big fan of watching youtube. The strategy I came up over the years is this:

    Install the latest versions of mpv, smplayer, and smtube. Its important to use a distro that keeps these software repos up to date. Use smtube to select a youtube video, it sends it to smplayer which downloads the latest yt-dlp. If everything is up to date, it plays great.

    I have a 15 year old laptop that is finally having a hard time running latest linux mint xfce. I wanted to revive it this week so I gave mx linux a shot on it. Installing these programs right from MX’s software repositiories was a breeze. Youtube played effortlessly! MX is pretty minimal and im sure most pis can run it okay, so give it a shot if you want a OS with up to date repos for these packages if youtube is one of your main concerns.

    Once you get youtube videos playing, go into settings of smtube to change the web page from tonvid to an invidious instance. Add a custom invidious instance. Pick one thats ideally from your country and that lets you register an account. That way you can import subscriptions and personalize stuff.

    Only hiccup is when using smtube to load an invidious site; the default language will be some foreign language. Make sure you know how to go to settings in invidious and change to english.

    • Lumisal@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      2 months ago

      Very useful, I’ll try this too.

      Question though - I thought yt-dlp downloaded videos?

      And can sponsor block be integrated into this in any way?

      • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        yt-dlp does download videos. When you “stream” a video to firefox, all that means in simple terms is that firefox is downloading the video in small chunks at a time instead of the whole thing at once These chunks of downloaded video are saved to temporary memory called a ‘cache’ and deleted after you are done the video. yt-dlp is most often used to download the entire video as a digital file onto permanent memory ; however it doesn’t have to be used that way. Other applications like smtube can work with yt-dlp, using it as a way to do the heavy lifting of talking to youtubes servers and streaming video in the same exact way firefox does.

        Doing a quick search, there are some projects to implement mpv with sponsorblock. Im not the most technical person and prefer not to get my hands dirty with complex hacked together scripts that require compilation or whatever. Thats not to discourage you if you want to follow up on those things know people are working on it but if you aren’t a power user it may be a hard time to get that kind of thing working.

        • Lumisal@lemmy.worldOP
          0·
          2 months ago

          That’s extremely useful to know about yt-dlp.

          I’ve only ever used it to download videos permanently fire offline viewing when traveling. I never knew it could work as a temp cache as well.

          I’ll probably make a comment linking comments here with good solutions soon.

          Ask that’s left is to figure out a decent IPTV program. Really liked Hypnotix but it seems it’s just too much for the Pi

            • Lumisal@lemmy.worldOP
              0·
              2 months ago

              I didn’t know VLC worked with IPTV. I’m guessing through plug in?

              VLC was giving me issues too when playing video as well though, but only on some distros

              • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                I got the directions from iptv-orgs github

                1. open up vlc media player or in theory any.
                2. select the media tab in top left, navigate to ‘open network stream’
                3. Copy paste this url

                https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u

                Note: No video will play. this is to import a playlist of iptv streams. 4. Open vlc’s playlist viewer with ctrl+L or right click > view > playlist You should see a bunch of streams probably in all sorts of languages since this is the main global playlist. Go to search bar located top right to search playlist for the stream you want. I live in us so I searched for fox news based around my states capital. You can look for a more specific iptv-org playlist for your language and stuff.