Last Updated on August 25, 2020
Video Playback in Web Browsers
There’s tons of web browsers available for Linux. But I’ve focused on two very popular ones: Chrome, and Firefox.
Google Chrome has long been considered the speed king of browsers and has always focused on performance. It dominates the browser market, largely because of the prominence of Google, its simple design, and fast loading of web pages.
Let’s kick off with Chrome in conjunction with Amazon Prime Video. Sadly, streaming movies and TV shows from Amazon Prime Video doesn’t support 4K videos at that high resolution. The highest resolution available is HD on the streaming service. This applies to Linux, Windows, and other operating systems.
No special configuration is needed with Chrome. Using the best video quality available (HD), playback was excellent with low CPU usage with the AWOW AK41.
Things didn’t work out of the box with Firefox. With this browser, starting an Amazon Prime video generates a Digital Rights Error. It’s trivial to fix this issue though. Just enable Digital Rights Management (DRM Content) from about:preferences. After enabling DRM and restarting Firefox, the web browser was able to play Amazon Prime Video material. Playback was good but it’s not as frugal with CPU as Chrome.
I wanted to try Netflix, but my subscription expired a while back. But I’ll come back to looking at this service on the AWOW AK41 at a later date.
Over the week, I watched many videos from BBC iPlayer’s service. BBC iPlayer is an internet streaming, catchup, television and former radio service from the BBC. This service typically encodes videos at 1280 x 720 using the H.264 Codec although there are some videos encoded with lower dimensions. Playback was very good with the AWOW AK41 under Manjaro. No complaints here.
Turning to YouTube, I watched a variety of videos encoded at various dimensions including 4K on both Chrome and Firefox. Playback of 4K videos in either web browsers suffers from high CPU usage with the AK41. You have to lower the resolution for smooth playback. If you want to watch 4K YouTube videos, a solution is to use a download manager (such as DownZemAll!) which lets you download the 4K videos, and then play them back with VLC, mpv, or Kodi.
Next page: Page 3 – Music playback
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Video Playback
Page 2 – Video Playback in Web Browsers
Page 3 – Music Playback
Complete list of articles in this series:
| AWOW AK41 Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 11 | Video consoles: SNES emulation |
| Week 10 | Running TeamViewer with AWOW AK41 as the host |
| Week 9 | Astronomy on the AK41 including Celestia, Stellarium, Skychart, and more |
| Week 8 | Recording video with OBS Studio |
| Week 7 | Home computer emulators: FS-UAE, ZEsaurUX, Hatari, Clock Signal |
| Week 6 | Web browsing with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi |
| Week 5 | Gaming: SuperTuxKart, AwesomeNauts, Retrocycles, Robocraft, DOTA 2, and more |
| Week 4 | Run multiple operating systems on the AK41 |
| Week 3 | Video and audio playback looking at hardware acceleration |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the AK41 with 3 other low power machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC.
Looks very capable providing hardware acceleration is available
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