I just installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an older computer I had for an HTPC. All I really wanted to do was use it to watch YouTube, Twitch, and browse the internet. Unfortunately, it fails at watching videos online. The video is watchable, but it is somewhat choppy and laggy. I realize this question has been asked before but the questions I've seen are old with Ubuntu 12.x and when Youtube was using Flash. If I'm not mistaken, YouTube is all HTML5 now. I checked some settings in Chrome and it indicates that certain hardware acceleration is turned off because things are unstable in Linux. You can change some flags in Chrome manually to enable these things but apparently you could damage your graphics card hardware if you do so. I've tried watching in Firefox and it is better than Chrome but still not buttery smooth like I get on my Win 7 PC. Yes, I am running Ubuntu on an older machine with a slower x86 processor however, before installing Linux I tried watching some videos with the machine running Windows XP and it was fine so I doubt it has to do with poor hardware. I don't care which distro I need to install, if there is another one that works perfectly for YouTube videos I will install it since that is the only purpose of this machine. Please advise. Other questions have random things to try in order to fix the problem. My question is, is there a real solution to this problem now on Linux or is web browser video playback not on par with Windows at this point?
Edit - System Specs:
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Memory 3.9 GiB
Processor Pentium Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.5GHz x 2
Graphics GeForce 9600 GT/PCIe/SSE2 (I'm using the HDMI out)
OS type 32-bit
Disk 487.9 GB