Other What's ruining your life right now?

I cannot find the Rotring T-05 mechnical pencil my mum bought me in 1996 that I have used continuously ever since.

I know it is in my drawing space somewhere but I currently do not know exactly where. I must own fourty mechanical pencils, but life is on hold until I can find that specific one, I value it more than I value many people's lives.

#Edit. Found it!

 

I know about trying to find something, I was trying to find my Win10 USB drive for three days.

 

Dude.... ain't the same ****ing ball park. It ain't the same league. It ain't even the same ****ing sport!

 

Two weeks for a CPU to be delivered and all the while I hadn't even bothered to check whether the intended cooler will fit properly. The cooler does not fit the board...

 

Arse!

 

Welcome to the wonderful world of failing memory!

 

The absolute state of hardware-accelerated video playback in browsers under Linux. This time I was willing to make the commitment to using Linux as my main day-to-day operating system, yet something as trivial as lacking hardware-accelerated video decoding is enough to convince me otherwise.

1080p YouTube playback is choppy and laggy, 1440p is worse again (and drops a ton of frames) and 2160p is watchable for all of about half a second or so at a time. I know an HD4600 iGPU isn't really a powerful GPU but it can damn well do hardware-accelerated video playback. None of the major browsers - Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and I even tried Brave - support it, and it seems that for Chrome/Chromium it is basically never going to happen. I have no interest in compiling a browser from source code, using a custom build from a third-party maintainer, or applying tweaks & hacks that will be reset/removed every time there is an update. If there's a simple solution that doesn't involve any of that then I am yet to find it, and I am more than happy to be pointed in the right direction.

This should simply work out of the box. I'm not even talking about DRM-laden streams like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, just ****ing YouTube would be nice.

inb4 the 'ugh, who needs proprietary, ad-infested, tracker-laden Google crap' snobs - people watch videos on YouTube in browsers, so just deal with it, ok?

EDIT: Oh, and holding middle-click to scroll would be nice, too - gonna take me a while to unlearn that if I stick with Linux!

 

Psychiatrist completely blew me off on a med change and I need shoulder surgery like 17 years ago.

 

For chrome on linux*, go to settings / advanced / system & switch on "Use hardware acceleration when available".
* - Posted from Google Chrome 83.0.4103.106 (Official Build) (64-bit), on Kubuntu Linux 20.10

 

I use exactly the same OS version and Chrome build

That's enabled out of the box



But if I check chrome://gpu, I see the following...



And if I check chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode, I see this...



Which means that when I play a 4K video in YouTube, my CPU does this



If I were to use Chromium Beta from this PPA however, accelerated playback is enabled and I can even use sites like Netflix. But see my prior comments on relying on third-party maintainers/repos... I got really pissed off and really ranty last night because such a simple thing should not need so many extra steps to get it working. It still pisses me off, because it's things like that hinder mass adoption of desktop Linux operating systems. EDIT: And judging by the diatribe that follows, it seems I'm just as ranty this morning

However... the community is why we can use Linux in a desktop operating system in the first place, and in this case the community-based solution really isn't that much of an effort for someone who's been around a computer since they were 5 years old. The point is that I really shouldn't need to do this. Other video playback software has successfully implemented VAAPI and VDPAU support for many many years now, to the point where a computer that costs $35 can play back 1080P high-definition video flawlessly.

Mozilla is apparently working on it for Wayland right now, but it seems that Chrome and Chromium will never support it - ever - and the reason given is that they don't want to have to deal with the state of Linux video drivers. If you implement a standardised API then it's not up to you to deal with the graphics drivers, is it?! Game engines don't have to worry about supporting every single possible AMD or Nvidia driver revision, they just implement OpenGL, Vulkan, or DirectX and be done with it!

 

My bad. Didn't think to double check it actually worked.

 

BTW, my rant wasn't intended to tell you to GFY, or to teach you how to suck eggs! Apologies if it came across that way!

If your hardware is powerful enough it's likely you'll never notice. I don't notice any issues on my Linux (Mint) laptop, but I do with my desktop and my desktop is more powerful...

 

What CPU is it?

Have you seen this? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration

Particularly the section under installation regarding the linux drivers for VA-API?

 

I hadn't, but I've just checked using vainfo command that wiki mentions and hardware accelerated video decoding (via VAAPI) is indeed supported by my graphics drivers/GPU.

The problem is having it enabled in a browser. If I run a dedicated video playback application - say, Plex, Kodi, mplayer-based applications, VLC, etc - then it'll use GPU accelerated decoding for all supported profiles using VAAPI - or indeed VDPAU, for Nvidia GPUs. But if I play a video in YouTube using my browser then it'll use purely CPU-based decoding/playback. Whether I have an lowly Intel iGPU or a monstrous RTX2080Ti, Chromium (and therefore Chrome) will never use it to accelerate video playback. Even though there's been a Chromium source code patch available for two years...

I'm going to try the aforementioned third-party PPA later today... I'm willing to jump through a few hoops in the name of sticking to my principles!

 

Ahh, gotcha, a browser issue rather than Linux. My bad. You are right, Chorme and Firefox don't support it despite numerous rants all over the net.

 

OK so I did that and it works beautifully... as long as I install the enhanced-h264ify extension to block VP8, VP9, and AV1 codecs and force h264. Problem is, when I block those codecs I also lose the option for anything over 1080p.

Jesus. ****ing. Christ.

So out of interest I tried Firefox. Beautifully smooth playback and not a single dropped frame at 1080p, 1440p, or 2160p. OK, so what about 60FPS then? 2160p60 is just.... laughable... 1440p60 is a mess, and even 1080p60 drops the odd frame here and there... Chrome on my 'regular' desktop on the other hand? 2160p60 is flawless. What do I see in chrome://media-internals? Oh look, MojoVideoDecoder instead of Dav1dVideoDecoder or VpxVideoDecoder, which means that it's using hardware-accelerated video decoding... Of course that box runs Windows, doesn't it...

So I'm just going to walk the hell away from it and stop worrying about it for now.

Calm. Serene. It doesn't bother me...

 

Small and annoying more than ruining, but I have had my Cintiq running on the wrong screen setting on my new machine. It's been on Adobe RGB instead of Native + Calibration, so the test print I just got today looks too green. Now it's on the right settings and everything I painted this week looks green. It's time to spend some time with the Hue + Saturation tool, hello friend!

 

I couldn't leave it alone, could I? Not even for an hour.

Wanted to watch a film, which I have stored in 4K on my media server. Can't do direct play via a browser on this desktop because.... all these reasons I've been ranting about. I don't really want to transcode down to 1080p because the point of having a 4K film instead of 'regular' 1080p is having it in 4K instead of 'regular' 1080p.

But it's fine, because Plex has a desktop application. No need for browser shenanigans.

Except Plex doesn't have a desktop application for Linux.

Plex Media Theatre is long discontinued. The new replacement application doesn't have a Linux version. Which means I'm back to browser-only Plex. But I can't use the Plex web interface to watch from my Plex server on my new desktop because... of all these things I've been whining about. Of course I could try making a square peg (the Windows Plex desktop application) fit into a round hole (Kubuntu) using a big heavy hammer (Wine), but that means I have to spend more time in configuration, setup, and research instead of just being able to type an apt-get command or run an install binary.

I tried. I really tried. I was prepared even to switch my gaming machine across to Linux-only and use Proton for games that aren't Linux-native. The thing that pisses me off the most is that I have had so much trouble just doing what should be the simplest ****ing task a modern computer can do: play a ****ing video.

I have spent way way too much time and effort on this, I do not have the time to spend fighting my tools to make them do the job I need them to do. So.... **** it, I'm done, I give up. I'm going back to Windows.