I have beat my head against the wall on the Raspberry pi forums for hours on this, but I am shocked to find nothing that makes sense.

I KNOW that in Stretch the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is COMPLETELY capable of playing 1080p mp4 with ZERO issues on VLC, because I used it as my media machine for YEARS. No desktop slowdown, no UI issues - just plays the video like I was opening it on a modern multi-core machine. The microSD card that was still in there when I pulled it out still DOES function that way, although it’s obviously now an unupdatable security nightmare…

But it seems that every new Raspbian OS update after that… bullseye, trixie… all play video like they’re broken lemons. Playing through VLC is still PASSABLE with massive frame drops and awful UI lag, but playing video in a browser just displays solid pink colors, despite hardware acceleration being enabled.

What changed? Is it just the Wayland switch? Is it just impossible to use these things to their full potential anymore? I hate to throw out perfectly good old hardware that clearly CAN perform my use case, because the OS broke compatibility with it.

Can anybody explain what happened, or if it’s fixable?