CPU utilization while using site

[cmccolgan]

I've been enjoying exploring this site for a few days but have discovered a utilization issue at times where I'd start getting audio dropouts / lag. This has corresponded to the CPU of my system being pinned at 100% (I have an older quad core Intel CPU so this is part of the issue). Turns out the component of the site that's chewing up all the CPU at these times is the embedded YouTube videos playing that seem to default to 1080p50. If I knock this down to 720p50 (which is still significantly higher the the original source resolution and given the window size is indistinguishable) then my CPU utilization drops significantly and the lag goes away.

Might I suggest either defaulting the resolution down a step or two (I'd think 480p would look exactly the same given the source material and windows size) or exposing to the user the ability to tweak the quality? I don't see an easy way to do this for embedded YouTube videos perhaps there is or maybe there's some setting I can change.

Thanks and love the site. I've been exploring the discrete audio channels provided and the content is amazing!

[cmccolgan]

For those of you who are also having this issue I've discovered a bit of a root cause and a solution.

I'm using Google Chrome as my browser and it looks like Chrome has issues offloading video decoding from the CPU to certain classes of Nvidia GPU's. If video decoding isn't properly offloaded to hardware than the CPU is given the task to do it in software which is very intensive. I'm using an older GPU using the Nvidia Fermi architecture but there are reports of this issue with much newer Nvidia GPU's as well. There are a variety of workaround in Chrome for this but it seems like many people who are having this issue aren't able to make these workaround work (these workaround involve settings in chrome://flags/ specifically around #ignore_gpu_blacklist).

My solution to this problem has been to use Firefox. Using Firefox I'm able to view the site fine even with YouTube video streaming at 1080p50.

The core issue here btw seems to be chrome + YouTube's VP9 rendering engine + Nvidia.

So if you're have this problem a solution is to use Firefox for the site. To be clear this isn't a site issues but is a Chrome or Nvidia issue depending on who's complaining about it.

[bfeist]

Sounds like you've found a workaround. This website asks a lot of the computer running it. Older computers are going to have a tough time. Also, YouTube totally ignores quality directives sent to it and streams whatever it feels like. Frustrating.

Ideally, the website would not use youtube, but being a hobby project there's no way I could pay for that bandwidth!

Ben