I run an extension that allows to automatically request h.264 streams from YouTube even when av1 is also available. Saves a lot of CPU, at the cost of some bandwidth.
It’s funny that this kind of browser extension has recurred over the years. Originally it was to replace the awful CPU hog flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player[1], then it was to sidestep YouTube’s insistence on VP* codecs, and now it’s to sidestep AV1.
In a beautiful world, there would be a link to each codec to let the user decide, or the browser itself would override the web site's preference and provide such links. It's sad that we keep having to resort to browser extensions to circumvent terrible web site and browser software.
Assuming you have hardware support for VP9 as well, setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config achieves the same outcome without an extension.
Yep, that's what I use. It took youtube from using 100% cpu, to the point where my little xps13 was thermal throttling, to 50% cpu running 1080p at 2-3x speed.
It's pretty old, like from 2016 so it's only got an i5 7200U (2 core 4 threads) @ 2.5ghz.
Mostly fast enough for what I use it for (content consumption, web browsing, light gaming and coding). It's mainly limited by it's 8gb of ram which isn't upgradable.
I looked now and noticed that I actually reject VP8 and VP9 and accept AV1. I run Linux on a Ryzen 4750U, for the record. It did not have trouble chewing through VP8 / VP9 without skipping frames, but it ran unpleasantly hot.
