[RPi5] Slow playback of even 720p from YouTube

    I'll put the smoking gun up front: A while ago lightning hit near my house and caused a short blip. Didn't take anything out, except one of the hdmi ports on my raspberry pi 5 running LE.

    But, I just plugged into the second port and everything has been working fine for months now. In every other respect I've been using it no problem.

    Except, I think this may have affected something on the Pi5 but it's ... odd and I can't rule out a configuration problem as this happened shortly after setting it all up ... or maybe an expectation problem? I can watch 4k high bitrate hevc content on it no problem. Hardware decoding seems unaffected. But I'm having issues playing youtube videos (vp9 I think) of even 720p resolution. 420p fine, 720p or up ... slow (I'll elaborate soon). I'm aware that there's no hardware codec for this, but my searches indicate most people have no trouble with even 1080p on a pi 4.

    I've played with the youtube addon settings some however many of them just break things and none I've tried make the problem better.

    I'm trying to figure out what to do now by just asking: Is this normal? Should I not expect the pi 5 to be able to play these videos in the first place? Or am I overlooking something wrong SOFTWARE wise that could cause this? OR is my pi actually broken? I really don't want to buy a new one and find out I have the same problem. I'm not sure how to narrow it down.

    More detailed symptom description: The video doesn't seem to drop frames it just seems to play back fractionally slower than it should, and starts getting out of sync with the audio until every minute or two the video jumps forward to catch back up with the audio. I also don't have this with other video addons (Like Twitch, but they probably just use very different codecs). There's no buffering, no other issues. Just... sluggish video.

    Maybe an extra data point: I also seem completely unable to stream from youtube even though my settings appear to be correct (I'm using InputStream Adaptive) ... for definitions of correct that may be incorrect, I dunno. That's why I'm asking.

    Why post it here? Because LE community should have a good idea of what this configuration should be expected to do given the same software.

    In theory de-featuring the board to a single HDMI connector shouldn't be an issue, but if you fuzzed one thing it's possible other things were damaged too. Historically i'm able to play 4K30 VP9 content from YouTube, although I didn't test since the rather niche regression below was possibly added (and can't test from current location).

    There is one software regression we are triaging, noted when playing 4K H264 on an RPi5; much higher resolution than 720p VP9 but also software decoding so there's a chance your issue could be the same thing. Log in to the RPi5 over SSH, run rpi-eeprom-config -e and add SDRAM_BANKLOW=3 to the end of the file, then reboot. Any better after? NB: If no difference, it's not the same issue and you can revert the change.

    Quote from Chatsubo

    A while ago lightning hit near my house and caused a short blip

    Contact insurance and check your other house equipment in the mean while. I had something like that years ago and I was covered.

    Quote from Chatsubo

    Except, I think this may have affected something on the Pi5 but it's ... odd and I can't rule out a configuration problem

    720, that's and odd problem.

    To rule out any issue, start replacing components one by one. In your case I would create a new LE sdcard and test the basics. If the problem remains move on to the next like cables and such. Then finally try a different TV just to rule things out.

    If all remains the same you most likely have a board issue. Take it out and try to look for any burn marks. Sniff it, sometimes it smells but you cant see any damage. Most likely place would be near any connectors where cables go into the board.

    Good luck.

    So I found the answer and it was none of the above, but it leads to a slightly annoying problems. In order to play most 4K movies nicely I'd at a stage set the refresh rate in the settings menu to 23.97 fps. This works well for that content. But apparently THIS is what caused my funky playback with Youtube (but not other things... I dunno). I found various ways around this: Set the setting to automatically change refresh rate... some content blanks my TV out (prob. unsupported resolution/frame rate combos). Set the sync setting: Audio pitch shifts around. Set the display refresh to 30/60: Makes 4k movies choppy sometimes.

    Anyway... it seems all works fine if I keep changing to the right combo, I just have to keep adjusting my settings to suit different situations. Better than nothing. Thanks for the inputs.