Over the past ~10 years, I've come to the conclusion that it's best to just pipe high quality video streams into a cross-platform external video player like mpv

Over the past ~10 years, I've come to the conclusion that it's best to just pipe high quality video streams into a cross-platform external video player like mpv[0][1][2]. I can't remember what Firefox uses internally to decode/display different video codecs (ffmpeg like mpv? system builtins? hardware media encode/decode, like on the M1?), but I've always found that, through yt-dlp[3]/ streamlink[4] integration, a native external video player like mpv is better able to support high quality video streams without constantly dropping frames or tanking the performance of the tab/browser. I can't put my finger on exactly why browser video streams feel so bad to me, but they do. Maybe it's the DOM overhead, or maybe it's something else. My personal takeaway is that browsers still just aren't optimized enough for fast/performant video playback. [0]: https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/ [1]: https://github.com/grmat/play-with https://github.com/grmat/play-with [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/ [3]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [4]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink