James Harris  wrote:
> On 03/07/2019 17:27, Pancho wrote:
>> Hi I've just tried using a Pi 4 4GB under Raspbian. The answer is that
>> whilst it is undoubtedly very impressive it isn't good enough for a
>> general purpose desktop.
>>
>>
>> The good:
>>
>> * Chromium browsing not featuring video was good. Perhaps a bit slow but
>> not annoyingly so.
>> * vlc could play x264 video perfectly at 1080p, at about 5% cpu.
>> * Generally apps/windows opened at an OK speed.
>>
>> The bad:
>>
>> * vlc was poor at playing x265 at 1080p, jerky, 50% cpu and about 30%
>> dropped frames.
>> * Youtube video was awful, slow, jerky. As were other, popular, free
>> video Streaming sites.
>> * Amazon Video wouldn't play at all due to chromium not being a
>> supported browser.
>> * LibreOffice Calc gave painfully slow scrolling, on a sheet with 365
>> rows and 26 columns.
>>
>> General comments. The main problem seems to be applications lacking
>> support for hardware video decoding and maybe also a lack of GPU
>> support. In particular Chromium doesn't seem to be doing video efficiently.
>>
>> So I will use this Pi as a server rather than a desktop.
>>
>
> You mentioning video reminds me of talk of running an HTPC on earlier
> Raspberry Pi models. If they worked, maybe they didn't use them to view
> Youtube and the like, of course.
>
> Thanks for the above info. I wanted to move to a 4k desktop when I saw
> the RPi4 announcement. For various reasons I will look into the idea of
> mini-itx that Martin mentioned but will maybe come back to the RPi4 for
> an HTPC front end to a MythTV system - at least at up to 1080p.

For lack of vp9 hardware decoding, I fear the Pi4 will never be good for
Youtube 4k videos. And it's a real shame they couldn't squeeze h.264
hardware decoding in, so no higher than 1080p for that either. And while
the cpu is capable enough to decode that, it will require active cooling, I
guess.

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