Tips to avoid laggy videos on old hardware

A Former User

hello! i had a pc with opera on it,sadly it has broke and i am using an old laptop right now, i watch a lot of youtube videos, but they are kinda laggy,are there any tips or tricks that i can fix lag on videos? thanks

[Mod note: Title fixed this time to fit the rules]

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

You can try disabling opera://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode if your GPU is too old/slow or the driver for it is too old/buggy. You can check opera://gpu to see what's enabled/disabled and what workarounds are in place for driver bugs. You can also try tweaking some of the other GPU settings in opera://flags (at your own risk).

You can also try disabling opera://settings/?search=hardware%20acceleration (check "show advanced settings).

Whenever a video has the option, choose a lower quality.

If the site has the option, choose to play videos with Flash instead. If that's still a problem, you can right-click on the Flash video and disable hardware acceleration for Flash to see if that helps. There might be ways (like extensions) to force Flash for certain sites like Youtube.

You can check the power plan options in Windows and under its advanced settings, you can make sure performance for everything is set for max performance.

Even though Opera is based on Chromium, try things in Chrome too as sometimes playback might be smoother. I know that's not a solution for Opera, but...

Make sure you're not doing anything else on the computer at the time you're watching the video. You can also play with realtime protection in your anti-virus to see if it's slowing things down too much.