PSA: Workaround for laggy YouTube playback in native browser
asked 2019-07-30 22:44:47 +0200
Do you too experience laggy video playback in the native browser? Then you may be trying to play vp8/vp9 videos over ~360p. This happens on YouTube frequently nowadays. Unfortunately it is hard to find out what codec is used, but one indication of vp8/vp9 could be that you have multiple resolution settings beyond 360p and 720p available to you.
Why does it lag? vp8 and vp9 are software codecs built in to the browser, and phones just aren't very powerful. :( h264 on the other hand is hardware accelerated through gstreamer bindings.
Workaround: Go to about:config in the address bar and uncheck media.webm.enabled This makes YouTube fall back to h264, since the browser does not report that it supports vp8/vp9 any more.
Credits to @mal for helping me troubleshoot
Edit 2019-12-20: Unfortunately still needed for 3.2.1, even on Xperia 10