Apparently Verge said it "reportedly" struggles with 480p "Youtube videos". Which is doubly wrong, as who knows whether whatever mechanism was being used to pla

Apparently Verge said it "reportedly" struggles with 480p "Youtube videos". Which is doubly wrong, as who knows whether whatever mechanism was being used to play Youtube even supports the hardware decoding capabilities of the Pi. I'm not sure that transcoding has anything to do with it, unless the transcoding was happening on the Pi itself (which would indeed be dumb). Most of the time people are transcoding things it's x264 -> x264 with Plex, just with a much lower bitrate (and probably 720p) because (as you say) their player's platform can't handle it and no one cares about video quality these days.