zlacker

> There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies

That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)

>>zokier+(OP)
AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work?

But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.

>>jabl+9a
You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.

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

>>UncleS+mf
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.

>>2000Ul+Jz
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.

>>dmitry+CP1
Mp4 is the container. H264 is the video codec.

>>anthk+EX1
got me, it was DivX and XviD which are indeed newer and fancier than MPEG2

>>dmitry+rQ2
And still much easier to play than h264. A Pentium II with NetBSD was more than enough.

Nowadays on an n270 CPU based netbook I use mpv and yt-dlp capped to 420p, even if I can play 720p@30FPS.