Video playback on Raspberry Pi 4B with Fedora 43 and Wayland (Sway)

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1

I have a Raspberry Pi 4B with Fedora 43 connected to my TV. I am using sway as the compositor. I have libavcodec-freeworld from rpmfusion installed.

When I use mpv to play videos there is a noticeable stutter. With 1080p videos the CPU gets pegged to 100%. But even with 720p video there are lots of dropped frames and video stutters sometimes even though the CPU usage is around 50%.

I have also tried vlc and kodi without much success. I have tried looking around for solutions but haven’t found one. Has anyone managed smooth video playback with rpi4 on Fedora? Is there a guide I can use to configure the pieces involved?

2

You could try instead to use the guide at RPM Fusion to switch to Full FFMPEG and remove libavcodec-freeworld.

3

Thanks a lot! I tried that, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. I think this might be because some of the proprietary stuff is only available for x86. I remember the advice of Asahi Linux devs was to stick to libavcodec-freeworld due to this.

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4

I would investigate hardware decoding on the Pi 4 then,

There does seems to be 264 and 265 (HEVC) decoding in the hardware, so maybe the fine felloes at the Pi forums have some more advice than we do.

5

Thanks again! I read that thread but wasn’t able to figure out what I need to get hardware decode working.