enhanced-h264ify VS mainline

Probably it uses hardware acceleration for Netflix but YouTube serves a newer format for which hardware acceleration is unavailable. The h264ify browser extension could help. https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify is a fork of that with some customization available.

It does help to keep to 720p video and have a separate gaming PC. The "x264ify-enhanced" browser extension (a fork of a discontinued extension) is useful for restricting Youtube to cpu-friendly codecs.

https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify Give it a go. I think you're making the issue out to be bigger than it is, but if this fixes it then great.

For YouTube, Google has been trying to move everything to AV1 codecs, which is more bandwidth efficient for them. But these processors don't support AV1 on the GPU, which makes the CPU do the work, which results in power consumption and lag. If you go to YouTube with say a Roku or something that doesn't support AV1, YouTube automatically falls back to VP8 or VP9, which the roku can transcode. So I use an extension in both Edge and Chrome called enhanced-h264ify. In its settings I block VP8 and AV1 for the YouTube domain. When I load a video then, it forces YouTube to use VP9, which uses more bandwidth (especially at 4K), but it's entirely on the GPU and makes for a buttery smooth playing session. https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify

I just remembered that some websites (like youtube) try to play video formats which are not supported by older integrated GPUs - and I have an extension installed (https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify) which makes youtube use other video codecs (that are supported by the GPU). Looking at this table, it's possible that you're having that issue as well (youtube by default likes to use vp9)?

Take a look.

If you make sure the hw decoders are working, it'll do 1080p/1440p h.264 just fine ;) On Linux you need to set it up to make it work in Chromiums - on Windows it just works. For Youtube you need something like https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify

Use https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify and block vp8, vp9 and av1.

See also https://github.com/bkw777/mainline which offers a UI to install the mainline kernels from mainline kernels PPA.

You are referring to this, right? https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

use the Mainline Tool to install the latest kernel: https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

on Ubuntu or derivates of it like Linux Mint just use https://github.com/bkw777/mainline which pulls newer updates automatically

Lastly, of you want to play with kernels, install mainline.....https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

On Mint 21? I don't think so. The only possible way would be to install Mint 20.3 which comes with the older Cinnamon before the Mutter rebase. You could then install a newer kernel like 6.3 using Mainline, but you would be stuck with an Ubuntu 20.04 base which means much older apps in the repositories.

Out of the box Ubuntu and derivatives (and also Debian upstream of Ubuntu) are probably shipping with older kernels. Normally I'd just suggest installing the GUI kernel version management tool mainline (IIRC mainline should just be available in the Ubuntu software center) and just installing a more recent kernel to get support. Though you indicated you didn't want to touch the command line, it is also very possible to load drivers that are not shipped with the kernel if someone were willing to do so.