Pale Moon struggles with H.264 videos on slow laptop, but not VP9

[UCyborg]

The internet is full of anecdotes how great H.264 codec is on slow hardware, but on the one slow laptop I have, at least on Pale Moon, it's the other way around. 720p 24 FPS videos in H.264 on YouTube are choppy with near constant 100% CPU usage (dual-core CPU, with 100% I mean both cores fully loaded). Hardware accelerated video decoding is working in Pale Moon, GPU's decoding engine's utilization is just rather low. For comparison with VP9, CPU usage is around 60% and video plays OK. The GPU doesn't support decoding VP9.

When playing the same video with MS Edge and using H.264 codec, compared to Pale Moon, GPU's decoding engine utilization is significantly higher, CPU usage is lower and video plays smoothly.

It's an inexpensive laptop from 2014, using AMD E1-6010 APU with Radeon R2, 2 GB of RAM, running 32-bit Win10 1809, using graphics driver from 2017.

Just wondering if there's anyone else out there with similar experience and if there's any explanation for the unusually poor performance in Pale Moon specifically using pretty much universally supported video codec.

I vaguely remember experimenting in the past sometime in the last 2 years on the faster computer, comparing both codecs on Pale Moon, having them both decoded on CPU, I also found CPU utilization to be lower using VP9. Someone on the forum mentioned bitrate, which is not equivalent, when you compare one video on YouTube with one or another codec. Maybe this is the catch?

[Moonchild]

Hardware-accelerated video decoding is a machine with many gears that all have to work harmoniously. h.264 uses a considerably different pipeline than VP9 and relies on different decoding pathways (h.264 GPU decoding goes through DirectX IIRC and VP9 goes through internal ffvpx code, but Travis might be able to provide more details there).
When decoding on the CPU, VP9 is likely lighter weight than the (much older) h.264 standard, so that would make sense for your observations in that case, but that kind of decoding will always be considerably slower than any hardware-accelerated decoding, and should only be considered a fallback.
I'm not sure to what level h.264 HW decoding is available on your APU.

Troubleshooting information might provide some insights.

[UCyborg]

Doesn't look very interesting:

Code: Select all

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[back2themoon]

Off-topic:

Greasemonkey for Pale Moon Version: 3.31.5

Version 3.31.5? Where's that? I thought it stops at 3.31.4

[Moonchild]

Distilling relevant parts:

Hardware H264 Decoding: Yes; Using D3D11 API
Driver Version: 22.19.162.4
Driver Date: 4-24-2017
media.hardware-video-decoding.failed: false
media.benchmark.vp9.fps: 26

So, it seems to be able to make successful HWA decoding calls and it's enabled for h.264
Your vp9 benchmark score is really low, though, so there's definitely some issue in the performance department but that may also be due to the hardware itself. I looked up the specs for the AMD E1-6010 and I'm afraid there just isn't much you can do on that hardware. A 10W 2-core APU... it's likely just not going to be good enough for smooth media playback in a non-dedicated application. I think the GPU is good enough to decode but you're running into CPU overhead, most likely, bottlenecking your playback (also considering the barely sufficient vp9 benchmark score). It also depends on the encoding settings of the media; if the h.264 is considerably higher bitrate it'll likely cause additional overhead.

[Nuck-TH]

Using 64-bit mainline(AVX) version may be beneficial for media for this case, because codecs still do some work on CPU even with HW decoding, with which AVX should help.

Upd: Noticed that system is 32bit. Eh, no dice then.

[UCyborg]

Yeah, that laptop could use more RAM. I tried running 64-bit Windows 10 on it once and it was practically unusable. Still, with Edge, at least older version 94, it fares, also scrolling web pages is pretty smooth while it's pretty much choppy all the time on Pale Moon.

Off-topic:

Greasemonkey for Pale Moon Version: 3.31.5

Version 3.31.5? Where's that? I thought it stops at 3.31.4

Off-topic:
Nowhere, just on my computer. I changed it so looking for script updates works if automatic extension updating is disabled in browser.