Comment by UncleSlacky

21 hours ago

You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.

Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode anything but MPEG2?

The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.

  • we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.

Good point. Though too late in this particular case, since the battery was also busted, I ended up e-wasting the machine.