play-with VS typometer

Over the past ~10 years, I've come to the conclusion that it's best to just pipe high quality video streams into a high quality 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?)

I can't put my finger on exactly why browser video streams feel so bad to me, but they still 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/

[1]: https://github.com/grmat/play-with

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/

You can download the tool here: https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer

Thanks, that's a really nice offer. Well, if your pi can run typometer that would be an ideal thing to test. Use an editor that has good typing latency. That is nothing based on electron or java. Geany or Kate should work. Don't use vim or emans on a terminal as most terminals have terrible typing latency (except xterm and mlterm)

Typometer with 200 characters

There is a great comparison between various terminals' latency https://danluu.com/term-latency/ (it comes up periodically on HN too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443076), so once when I was curious if it was just me or if RDP was indeed slower, I did a quick test using the same toolset - https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer

It is not a super-scientific test since:

0) I didn't spend too much time on this

open -a Spotify --args --disable-smooth-scrolling

You used to be able to disable Chrome's smooth scrolling with chrome://flags/#disable-smooth-scrolling, but that flag was removed for whatever reason.

I'm also surprised by how much faster Firefox's builtin middle mouse click autoscroll is compared to Chrome's ersatz AutoScroll[2] extension.

[0]: https://download.developer.apple.com/Developer_Tools/Additio...

[1]: https://pavelfatin.com/typometer/

[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...

First, about the methodology: I took all my measurements with typometer on an Ubuntu 18.04 computer running X11. I tried Firenvim (both in Firefox and Chrome), Fvim, Gnvim, Goneovim, Neovim-Gtk, Nvim-Qt, Nwin and Uivonim. I couldn't try Neovide because it didn't run on my computer. The terminal I tried was Kitty, which has better latency than Alacritty.

The first thing to do is to try and measure latency to confirm your feeling. You can use something like typometer ( https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer ) to do that.