Last Updated on April 19, 2021
Video Playback in Web Browsers
There’s tons of web browsers available for Linux. But we’ve focused on two very popular ones: Chrome, and Firefox.
Google Chrome has long been considered the speed king of browsers and has always centred 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. No special configuration is needed with Chrome. Using the best video quality available (4k-UHD), playback is excellent with low CPU usage with the Lenovo M93.
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 is able to play Amazon Prime Video material. Playback was good but it’s not as frugal with the CPU as Chrome.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve 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 is excellent with the Lenovo M93 under Manjaro. No complaints here.
Turning to YouTube, we watched a variety of videos encoded at various dimensions including 4K on both Chrome and Firefox. Playback of 4K videos is very smooth in either web browser. On many 4K videos, CPU usage of Chrome is arounfd 70-90% of 1 core. Playback is silky smooth and very impressive for this tiny machine.
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:
| Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 6 | Recording video using OBS Studio |
| Week 5 | We put the M93 through some light gaming |
| Week 4 | Multiple operating systems running on the Lenovo M93 |
| Week 3 | Video and audio are tested on the Lenovo machine |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC with other low power machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC.