So I recently made a discovery that I honesty feel daft for not realizing before.
For anyone who recently moved to Linux or like me didn’t think about it there are separate video acceleration libraries for your GPU! Now most of you were probably completely aware of that. But I wasn’t so I’ve been mainly watching TV on my ThinkPad X230 for a couple of years at this point, and I always found video playback kinda lacking sometimes(stuttering, screen tearing, etc), but I always though that was due to the generally bad intel GPU drivers on Linux( there are libraries for AMD and Nvidia too). Until I came across this page on the Arch wiki( which except package names should apply to any other distro).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
And I’ve since had much better video playback performance that no longer has stuttering and screen tearing!
So I hope this helps someone else at some point in time have a better experience on their Linux distro watching some TV or YouTube.
I hate this aspect of Linux. I spent countless days trying to figure this shit out on Tumbleweed. Turns out you have to manually install codecs. https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories
You wouldn’t know this because it really isn’t hinted anywhere until you notice your CPU going into overdrive when you play a 4K video on YouTube.
I don’t know how to explain this to any regular m$ user that this is a thing they need to do because reasons.