Low FR on fullscreen Youtube

Posted by: Dignan

Low FR on fullscreen Youtube - 27/11/2015 04:53

Does anyone else have this problem?

When I watch any Youtube video in full screen mode, the framerate lowers quite a bit. I'd say it's roughly 10-15 FPS. When I watch the video in the default window or "theater mode," the framerate is fantastic. Really smooth.

I've found some discussions of this online, but I can't tell if they're talking about the same issue, and none of the suggestions I've found there work anyway (turning off hardware acceleration makes all video playback bad).

This is in Chrome in my main computer, which should have plenty of power to play back at a high framerate.

I've tried IE, and the problem doesn't appear to be there. It's definitely not in Firefox. I really don't feel like switching browsers.

Any ideas? Has anyone else seen this?
Posted by: tfabris

Re: Low FR on fullscreen Youtube - 27/11/2015 05:49

That's really interesting that the problem doesn't occur in other browsers, only in Chrome. That suggests that Chrome is doing something different with its full screen video presentation than the other browsers.

I know that once upon a time it was possible to set YouTube to have different playback methods (for example HTML5 versus Flash), but I no longer see that option. However it might be interesting to check: Maybe Firefox+IE are using a totally different player method.

Another thing to check is the quality level of the data stream. When you get bad frame rates, what is the video quality of the playing video set to? If it's the highest setting, does the frame rate get better if you take it down a notch? And if you get good frame rate on the other browsers, are they defaulting to a lower quality setting than Chrome?
Posted by: drakino

Re: Low FR on fullscreen Youtube - 27/11/2015 15:06

Chrome has Flash embedded in it, a different sandboxed version then what (hopefully isn't) installed at a system level. Try disabling Flash in Chrome and see if the situation changes.