Online Media Streaming tips on Low End Hardware

Quick example on how to use low end hardware more efficiently for modern tasks.

Configuration used in this example:

Laptop: Samsung RV411

Processor: Intel Pentium P6100 (Dual core, 2,00GHz)
RAM: 4GB DDR3
Storage: 320GB HDD
System: Fedora Linux 42 XFCE

Use MPV for everything

mpv can be used in conjunction with yt-dlp to stream media from online sources (Youtube, Odysee, Peertube, and from direct media sources such as webm)

By default yt-dlp always gets the best quality format avaliable, but with a Pentium we are limited to 720p and below.

For this, you can add this line to your mpv configuration file:

# place this in .config/mpv/mpv.conf ! 
yt-dl-format=bestvideo[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best

This does not affect the playback of local files, only online media since it depends on yt-dlp in order to use it.

For local streaming

Pretty straightforward, prefer the following formats and codecs for your media:

720p or below
x264 | MPEG-4 AVC