Raspberry Pi OS Updated For Debian 11 Bullseye, Desktop Transitions To GTK3+Mutter

[grok]

After testing yesterday, Raspian OS 11 in 32bit and 64bits version, I am too disappointed, the KMS video driver now included in the kernel still does not allow watching videos on youtube in 720p or 1080p without interruptions or other problems.

My RPi 4 experience will end there, this machine is just not powerful enough for current use, I unplugged it yesterday while waiting to give / resell it to someone who is more interested in it than me, personally I have no time to waste with a half-non-functional system.

Desktops/laptops sometimes have trouble dealing with 1080p youtube too. Worse with the 60 fps modes. This stuff tends to work better on Windows and Android with the proprietary graphics driver and hardware video decoding APIs tuned for it.
Or maybe you need a web browser extension (h264ify) to ask youtube to send you H264/MP4 instead of VP9 video.
Failing that you would need to play youtube vids in external software rather than the browser..

[rclark]

personally I have no time to waste with a half-non-functional system.

Well, then use the RPI for what it was intended for. Learn/do programming, little database/file/etc. servers, robotics, electronic projects, etc. Leave the 'video' to to top of the line workstations/desktops if that is a high interest area when you pay $1500 on up for a machine (yea don't need Windows, Linux works just fine) . Kind of hard to expect a $15 to $75 device to have flawless video performance for hdmi high resolution applications ! As I said before most all my RPIs run headless anyway... And the one that doesn't video is very low priority on the want list. RPIs (and other SBCs) work great as long as you use them for things that suit them.

[willmore]

Well, then use the RPI for what it was intended for. Learn/do programming, little database/file/etc. servers, robotics, electronic projects, etc. Leave the 'video' to to top of the line workstations/desktops if that is a high interest area when you pay $1500 on up for a machine (yea don't need Windows, Linux works just fine) . Kind of hard to expect a $15 to $75 device to have flawless video performance for hdmi high resolution applications ! As I said before most all my RPIs run headless anyway... And the one that doesn't video is very low priority on the want list. RPIs (and other SBCs) work great as long as you use them for things that suit them.

The original Rpi was touted for its H.264 playback ability *by the Foundation*. So to say that expecting them to play back video well is not a fair expection is unreasonable.

[arQon]

This doesn't explain why you need a hike in RAM requirement to 2GB to run the DE, a typical resolution, 1920 x 1080 x 4 = 2073600 pixels * 4 (32-bit ARGB depth) = 7.91MB, needs about 8MB of memory to hold the screen contents and send it to a framebuffer.
The reason behind outrageous 2GB requirement to run a DE is probably the overall bloat, not to mention gjs javascript engine being used in gnome-shell.

You're mostly right on the first point, though most compositors are poorly written and will burn far, far, FAR more memory than they actually need, as dkasak says.
The second point though is just flat-out wrong: the Pi thankfully doesn't run GNOME Shell in the first place, so regardless of how much RAM that burns it's not relevant in this case.

[arQon]

After testing yesterday, Raspian OS 11 in 32bit and 64bits version, I am too disappointed, the KMS video driver now included in the kernel still does not allow watching videos on youtube in 720p or 1080p without interruptions or other problems.

Well, despite the "special HW-accelerated Chromium builds", this sadly does not come as a surprise. At a minimum, you're going to need the h264-ify plugin (though I'd have expected that to be part of the base image - it was for the Buster Pi builds), but even then you have no chance of 60fps videos working, and YT has been pushing HARD to have "creators" use 60fps placebo framerates for all 1080p streams and up, and in many cases even for 720p, thus guaranteeing that they have NO chance of playing properly even if you manage to get the stream in an accelerated format. ("Enhanced h264-ify" allows you to block 60fps options on YT, but that doesn't help if the only 30fps streams are 480p).

youtube-dl and mpv supposedly could help in theory, but since mpv doesn't support HW decode on the Pi4 (I haven't tried this release yet, but I don't see it mentioned anywhere and it's a feature that would be well worth shouting about if it worked now) it's more likely that it would be counter-productive in practice.

It's technically inaccurate to say that the Pi4 *can't* provide great video playback, but on a practical level it's correct and fair to say that it *doesn't*. As I explained in a very similar thread many months ago, the problems are almost entirely at the software level, but are now also being complicated by Google et al using VP9 to save on bandwidth costs.
Given RPF's minimal staffing (not helped by ffmpeg's failure to pick up their patches), even local video playback now looks like it may well take years to happen, if ever; and their inability to understand that they should be supporting VAAPI (let alone the question of whether or not the Broadcom trash-SoC *can* actually support it) instead of trying to carry a godawful mess of custom Chromium patches means that the outlook is even worse for streaming video, even without considering factors that are out of their control like which codec a website chooses to use.
For something that was advertised as capable of 4K HEVC playback, the reality is nowhere near that promise, and the outlook for it ever becoming true is extremely bleak. I agree, it's very disappointing.

[arQon]

After testing yesterday, Raspian OS 11 in 32bit and 64bits version, I am too disappointed, the KMS video driver now included in the kernel still does not allow watching videos on youtube in 720p or 1080p without interruptions or other problems.

oh - one piece I forgot is that Pulse's default behavior sucks on the Pi, and you need to check that it's running with tsched=0. That was set correctly on my old Raspbian install, but was missing from the Ubuntu one, so it's worth checking in case it got missed in this one.