Unless you count android at least

I blame the modern web for this

Relevant blog post.
Remember when if your aunt wanted you to build her a computer that she'd only use for "web browsing", that meant you could opt for the cheap components?
- I fully agree with the author but I was shocked when I saw iPhone 6S. Things were bad even back then?
Things haven't been the same since web 1.0 came out
- But they should. Or at least comparable.
  Think about the difference between Reddit and Lemmy. They both offer similar functionality, but Reddit will set your phone on fire if it gets the chance.
  The same is true for YouTube. Browsing YouTube is scrolling through an image gallery, only video playback should be a problem. Yet, it will consume more resources than a well equipped laptop had when YouTube was launched. That's insane.
  We're moving in a direction where computers get faster and faster, but for the last 10 years or so, the actual utility of the system as a whole stagnated. Besides games, what can a modern computer do, that a 2014 model couldn't?
- Not the same
It isn't a a web problem. The experience is the same for any video playback on a RPI
- Yeah, it's amazing how upvoted the previous comment is. Just a bunch of idiots jumping on the web-hate bandwagon when even basic media players like Kodi have a tough time playing back video on the Pi.
  It just isn't a very optimized device for video playback. The Pi 5 is actually a step backwards as well, providing only H265 hardware video decode which the web doesn't even use.

all Linux distros

This is not a Linux problem; Windows 10 would fare way worse. Maybe similar on a Pi 5, I've seen a review and it handles Full HD on either OS (only Linux can get consistent 1080p60 though).

Pi 5 can run windows?
- Yes but why would you? You'll need active cooling just doing basic things on the desktop.
- Anything can at least once
- Somewhat, Windows does have an ARM build afterall
I have a Pi5 hooked up to my living room TV and it does indeed play 1440p60 with zero issue. The OS is a bit laggy getting into the video, though. I want a case like I have for my Pi4, a case that allows for a built-in SSD.

There’s hardware video encoding/decoding support. I used a Pi3b+ to transcode video for a while and would easily get 2x or better on full 1080p video. The 4 is better and I’ve heard even better on the 5, but I’ve not had a compelling reason to spend that much to find out.

Yes.
Everything you say is correct.
I have a 4B, with 4 gigs.
Everything is logical.
Yet I've still been unable to achieve that despite trying multiple distros. Only Android of all things has successfully played YouTube (via smart tube) and video without any issues. I've also yet to see video evidence of smooth playback aside from one person on YouTube (Computers Explained I think), and it was only on Raspberry Pi OS. Which in fairness I kinda do too, but it takes like 12 seconds average to load a webpage on their version of Firefox (no added extensions) and either 5 or 30 on Chromium for some reason.
I've been trying to set the Pi as a htpc (that's not a lobotomized Kodi box) that can also do minor streaming and a few other things, for 5 days and counting. I made a nice click friendly desktop with Manjaro KDE for Pi, and the OS itself is snappy and fast. But any major video graphical elements and it becomes a geriatric Commodore 64.
I know (read:guess) it must be that something going wrong with hardware acceleration, but just can't figure it out. Maybe my Pi is cursed.
- Even on the Pi 5 the basic desktop environment in RPI OS with hardware acceleration working feels sluggish. I'm not sure if it's some weird power savings thing, but the pi just drops frames whenever it feels like it.
- Some tips:
  Rasberry pi OS is the lightest OS on pi
  Use Falkon as a browser, it’s much lighter
  Use mpv (or celluloid for simplicity) to watch YouTube videos and something like ytfzf (tui) or plasmatube (gui) for browsing YouTube
  Also gnome is a desktop environment not a distro
- My experience is similar. I don't play YouTube videos on my 4B with 8GB of RAM very often. When I do, I make sure it's well less than a quarter of my 1920x1080 screen. (I use a tiling window manager, so I usually just make my browser window the top-left quadrant of my screen and don't theater-mode or anything.) And I often reduce the quality to 480p or whatever.
  If I'm going to watch something longer than a few minutes and want to be doing other things on my Raspberry Pi while the video is running, I'll just pull it up on my phone propped next to my monitor.
You have black magic

That is why I do shit like this.

- Good one, love it! 😂
  Still, it keeps the temp down to about 60C, that's good enough compared to 85C before that.

I use ash btw

I recently dipped my toe into Linux with a raspberry pi and couldn't figure out why Firefox was so laggy. I thought maybe I did something wrong.

Well it's refreshing to see I'm not the only one
You need a machine with a functional GPU
Try it in a vm if you don't want to install it on bare metal (that isn't a raspberry pi)
You can also find cheap ass second hand laptops on ebay for similar prices to pis but should have much better performance, especially if you're willing to do some upgrades like installing a cheap ssd instead of the hdd.

I connected my raspberry pi to an rtx 6000

- At that point it's a raspberry beefcake, yeah?
My Pi5 won’t even support my backlit mechanical keyboard lawl

Raspberry PIs don't have a proper GPU with decoding. That's part of why they stink. The other issue is that they are locked to the Raspberry Pi kernel. They are absolutely proprietary!

Tried to get tons of distros working on my pi5 last week. It sucked. Then I found out that I need some special kernel.
But I thought it's just about things that aren't merged into the mainline kernel yet?
- It can't ever be merged (Broadcom)
So something like a Banana Pi wouldn't have this issue?
- To be honest with you I don't know what chip the Banana pi has so I don't know. It just annoys me that RPi is a Broadcom device

You just need a program that actually supports the hardware video decoder. I've played 30-40mbps bluray rips on a Raspberry Pi 1B without any issues in kodi. The video played smoothly with no frame drops. The user interface was very sluggish though.

The GPU and video acceleration on the Pi is weird, so software has to be built specifically for it.

Actually, Kodi did work well, yes.
It's just that I really dislike Kodi for the purposes I wanted to use the Pi for 😅
Even the YouTube made for it worked (although the interface is... Well, it's an interface).
It's still a plan D, in case can't get anything else to work
If only it were open
I guess we can't have a non proprietary open Linux computer

YouTube serves VP9 video (and more recently a lot of AV1) and I think the Pis only have hardware accelerated decoding of H.264/5 as it stands today

this is why h264ify is a pre-installed extension in RPiOS' builds of browsers.
made sense, until the Pi 5 dropped h264 hw decode. still waiting for a good explanation of that.
It's a good thing projects like Armbian are steadily improving support for Rockchip-based SBCs, to open up the market beyond Raspberry.

I'm running an all the mods 6 Minecraft server on my pi 5 with zero lag

No idea how video performance is but it's got a dedicated GPU so supposedly better.

Booting from an NVME, official heat sink/fan and proper power supply

How many players do you have on it at once and do you leave it on 24/7? Might use mine for that
- 2 or 3 at a time normally but I'm fairly sure it could handle more depending on modpack
  If you're doing it you need to get absolutely all the optimisation mods you can for the version and most importantly pregenerate the world. Once you do those things with two or 3 on it'll hover around 80% CPU usage
  I will say with 4 players on Infernal Origins it struggles, I suspect because it turns up the mob spawn rate, adds custom mob AI and generates massive unlit caves everywhere for them to spawn in
  On the ATM server we have 5 max upgraded apotheosis mob spawner grinders running 24/7 chunk loaded and the server's still pretty snappy still
External video card would probably work well now that you mention it. But at that point, for what I want to use it for, I might as well do an Intel Mini PC since it would use less power.
But good project idea if I ever want to set up a Minecraft server.
Same setup as you, fan and NVMe and I can play 720-1080p video without any issues from all of the streaming platforms I've tried so far as well as local files. Also streaming 1080p 60Hz gameplay from my gaming setup over LAN with no problems.

Kodi / Libreelec are in the same vein as Android TV. There extremely neutered operating systems that can basically only do that one thing, so if they failed at it, well...
You can really edit documents, run YouTube with a decent UI, possibly use sponsor block, can't do video game streaming.
Actually, I take it back, Kodi etc are more limited than Android TV on the Pi, since at least that supports Steam Link and Moonlight streaming.
So yeah, like Android, it can play the video. But it can do anything else like if I were to run any actual distro.
It struggles with vc1 though cause it can't hardware decode it

Is this a 4K HDR+ DV meme?

I've got low standards. At this point I'd be happy with 720p
- Yeah, gimmie some nice bitrate and Im happy. I would vastly prefer more fps over more pixels.

I run OSMC on a Pi 4 and it plays h.265 & h.264 videos at 1080p and h.262 at 576p just fine.

Yes, but OSMC can't run moonlight or edit certain typed documents as far as I know
- I don't know moonlight and don't know what you mean by “certain typed documents”, but AFAIK, OSMC is just Raspbian with some additional stuff. What I am saying is that media playback works just fine performance-wise for some media formats.

Do I smell something burning?

Did you bring your jerky in again?

Let me know if you find a fix. I'm trying to stream 3 of my cameras to the Synology surveillance GUI, and it's a fucking slideshow. I get a few frames a minute.
Gonna try the same thing on an orange pi

Sure thing. Let me know if you get better results using oranges rather than raspberries.
- Deal
You need a proper GPU. I would go with a board that has good encoding support or a Intel based minipc.

It's probably your ad blocker filtering thousands of trackers on YouTube.

Man people are weird, I guess people like web trackers & ads. I won't bring up ad blockers up I guess.
So weird I thought people valued privacy.😅

Happens on fedora 💀 even on my x64_86 rig