I installed Raspbian system in my Raspberry pi 4 and then I start watching YouTube. I want to make a dedicated review on this. Raspberry pi 4 is known as 4k video player also. My pi 4 is working on 2Ghz, with 650MHz GPU clock. Even it is too much compact but at the price of $130, is raspberry is good option for YouTube.

In my smart TV most of the times, I only watch videos on YouTube. So, we will also find out “Can we turn our TV to smart Tv using this device.

Raspberry pi 4 Testing setup:

I have 8GB RAM version and with a decent stock cooler, you can boost the all 4 cores from 1.5GHz(base) to 2.1GHz(turbo). Even there are options to max the Integrated GPU to 700MHz, but mine one is working on 650MHz. I am using 5v 5amp power supply and 32inch TV screen for display output.

Problems:

I want to record the performance with screen recorder and I installed one to my system. But once I open the YouTube in chromium tab and start recording. The CPU of Pi 4 has been maxed out. Screen recorder is consuming around 40% of CPU. For an honest review then I start recording externally using mobile camera.

YouTube performance:

At 720P:

There is about 40-60% CPU consumption, well I am using stock cooler to keep the thermals stable. I found there is some frame initially but after 4-5 seconds of continue playing video, I got a very stable 720p performance at 25FPS and without a single frame drop.

AT 1080P:

In 1080p the CPU consumption reaches to 70% and running on 38 degrees Celsius. The initial performance remains the same, there are some frame drops. It may be due to internet connection, then we will get a stable video at 1080p@25FPS. I played almost 10-20 videos and the experience remains the same.

Then I switched to 1080p@60FPS, but Pi 4 can’t handle this. I got a huge frame drop and after 30 seconds it is dropping frames continuously in whole of the video. Really a very bad experience with CPU maxed out to 100%.

Conclusion:

This device can play 1080p YouTube videos @25FPS. but moving on to the bigger resolutions or 60FPS this is no more responsive. Coming to the point of CPU, we can only open one tab when playing YouTube because the GPU is maxed on it. Multitasking can’t be done on this processor due to limitations of 1 thread per core.

If you are running the system on base speed of 1.5GHz, it is not able to play video on 1080p. And about turning old tv into smart TV, you can go for Amazon fire stick which will give more performance in less price and 4k video watching feature also.