Camera interface is not via USB on Raspberry Pi. There's a lot of redundancy in high frame rate, so the best way to improve memory footprint is compression.
Apparently that camera is compatible with v4l2 ("video for Linux 2") so it should work just fine on the RPi 4 provided you have the right cable. Here's a thread where some people discuss using it and similar cameras on the ODroid (which would use the same Linux subsystem): https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=6259
It wasn't The Verge that originally said the Pi4 struggled to play YouTube videos [1], it was Tom's Hardware [2].
Tom’s Hardware’s review notes that the hardware is able to handle many everyday tasks such as web browsing with up to 15 Chromium tabs, light image editing using GIMP, and document and spreadsheet work using LibreOffice. Unsurprisingly, the sub-$100 miniature PC has its limits. It reportedly struggles with full screen video playback from YouTube for example, even if you turn down the resolution to 480p.
Tom's Hardware were using a pre-release OS so it's possible the issues with video playback were caused by this?
It’s important to note that, at launch time, some important Raspberry Pi software doesn’t yet work on the Pi 4. To run Pi 4, you’ll need to download a brand new build of the Raspbian OS, Raspbian Buster. And not everything runs in Buster yet. During testing, we found numerous Python libraries or other required packages that weren’t compatible with the new OS.
My biggest problems involved video playback. If I wanted to watch a YouTube video, I had to keep it in a window, because even in 480p resolution, it was jerky at full screen. The other task I’d like to perform is playing retro games, but as of this writing, the Retropie package of emulators doesn’t work with Pi 4.
During extensive hands-on testing, I found that, while the 4K at 30 Hz is tolerable, little things like the movement of the mouse pointer are a bit sluggish. If you have a 4K screen, you’re definitely better off going for the 60 Hz mode, but note that the added voltage may also cause your CPU to get hot and throttle more easily.
While surfing the web, looking at still images and just enjoying all the extra screen real estate of 4K is great, video playback is the Raspberry Pi 4’s Achille’s heel, at least as of this writing. Whether we were attempting to stream a 4K video or use a downloaded file, we never got a smooth, workable 4K experience, either in Raspbian Buster or LibreElec, an OS that runs the Kodi media player. Several H.264 encoded videos, including Tears of Steel, did not play at all or showed as a jumble of colours. Even the sample jelly fish videos that the folks at Kodi recommended for my testing appeared as still pictures with no movement. Clearly, there’s a lot of optimization that still needs to be done both on the OS and software side to make the Raspberry Pi 4 capable of playing 4K video.
Unfortunately, even streaming 1080p YouTube videos is a challenge at this point. Running at 1080p resolution, full screen video trailer for Stranger Things showed obvious jerkiness. However, the playback was smooth when I watched the same clip in a smaller window. The same problem occurred, even when I dropped the stream’s resolution down to 480p.
Playing offline 1080p videos works well, provided your screen is at 1920 x 1080 or lower resolution. A downloaded trailer of Avenger’s Endgame was perfectly smooth when I watched it using the VLC player.
I suspect the price point the Raspberry Pi targets isn't easily compatible with a truly high quality camera.
As I understand things, the Pi has a single lane of CSI at maybe 1.5 Gbps. That's enough for 1080p video, it's not enough for 4k video.
A high-end smartphone, on the other hand, has more like 5 Gbps of bandwidth to the camera, and the processing power needed to deal with that much data. But the device cost is 10x what an RPi costs, so they can afford it.
Can you link it? Was the video streaming or playing from disk? Perhaps it was an unsupported video codec? There are certain circumstances where the pi may struggle to play video, but I think for common formats they graphics driver has hardware level support for decoding. If the video format was weird and it had to decode with the CPU it could see problems. Another issue is the power supply. If you do not use a quality 2A power supply, a little red light by the power jack will indicate reduced power and it will throttle the CPU. This applies to the older PIs, but I've not seen the Pi4 yet.
A bit of topic: I recently got a Pi 4 and tried to use it to play 4k content on a TV. I could not get hardware decoding working and found a lot other people online with similar problems. I honestly was a bit disappointed because the Pi is often touted (in this thread as well) as having great software support, much better than all the other ARM single board computers out there.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281095
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