Hi all,
I built a fully up-to-date FreeBSD 13.1 media pc on a Lenovo Thinkpad m900 tiny host. I chose xfce as the DE, due to its lean nature, added Kodi on top and installed google chrome browser in a linux jail using this script to be able to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. Everything works as expected with a small problem: video playback is not smooth even for 720P, let alone 1080 or 4K. This is true for watching videos from the browser, or Kodi, which are locally stored files. I thought expecting smooth 4K playback may not be realistic from this hardware, but poor performance with lower resolution was something I didn't expect. There are 2 cores/4 threads on this CPU (i5 6500T) and they are 15-30% used each while video playback, and their temperature stays around 25-30 degrees Celcius max. Just to experiment, I used a Debian 11 live USB to compare the performance and saw that the hardware was actually able to play 4K videos smoothly, as well as the lower resolution ones (naturally). I really would like to keep this machine operating on FreeBSD, but I won't be able to do that unless I can optimize the video playback performance. Do you have any tips to help make this happen please?
Thanks!
I built a fully up-to-date FreeBSD 13.1 media pc on a Lenovo Thinkpad m900 tiny host. I chose xfce as the DE, due to its lean nature, added Kodi on top and installed google chrome browser in a linux jail using this script to be able to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. Everything works as expected with a small problem: video playback is not smooth even for 720P, let alone 1080 or 4K. This is true for watching videos from the browser, or Kodi, which are locally stored files. I thought expecting smooth 4K playback may not be realistic from this hardware, but poor performance with lower resolution was something I didn't expect. There are 2 cores/4 threads on this CPU (i5 6500T) and they are 15-30% used each while video playback, and their temperature stays around 25-30 degrees Celcius max. Just to experiment, I used a Debian 11 live USB to compare the performance and saw that the hardware was actually able to play 4K videos smoothly, as well as the lower resolution ones (naturally). I really would like to keep this machine operating on FreeBSD, but I won't be able to do that unless I can optimize the video playback performance. Do you have any tips to help make this happen please?
Thanks!