Ubuntu – Very high CPU usage in Firefox when watching YouTube on 17.10

cpufirefoxvideoyoutube

So I noticed that the fans of my Dell XPS 9560 kick in whenever I'm watching YouTube. I looked at CPU usage with top and powertop and 'Web Content' uses 50-90% of CPU. I googled a ton and it appears that Firefox just does not use hardware acceleration on Linux. So I followed every guide out there, changed every about:config line that is spoken of but the CPU usage is still the same. This is really annoying to me as I watch a lot of YT and my laptop is pretty powerful so this should not be the case. I tried both the Intel and Nvidia GPU but that is not the issue. Has somebody here found a solution?

I really searched all of AU and google but none of the solutions so far work.

Specs:

  • Intel i7-7700HQ
  • 16 GB DDR4 -2400MHz

Cheers

Best Answer

Same here, Firefox eats a lot of CPU(>100%) when playing Youtube videos. One tweak is to enter about:config in address bar, then search for below flag and make it true.

media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled

After that, the cpu usages becomes 20-40% which is kind of normal and on par with Chromium.

You could possibly get more juice after using this h264ify addon.

Related Question