HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

rallyemax · 2015-10-08 20:22:18

[Note: this post is long, almost inexcusably so. But I haven't been able to dig up any relevant errors anywhere, so I really don't know what might and might not be relevant, and thus I describe everything that I've observed and tried doing about it. The TL;DR version is pretty much in the subject line.]

I'm hitting a brick wall trying to troubleshoot this issue. Last night, Youtube videos ceased playing in Chromium. The video seems frozen at the beginning of the track (black screen initially), but the sound plays as normal. The track position indicator stays frozen at the very beginning of the video, but the track position bar does fill up gradually as the video is buffered and the sound progresses through the track. If I click/drag the position indicator to another location of the track, it will display the appropriate frame but video playback will remain stopped. Audio will play fine.

I tried other sites with HTML5 video, including HTML5 test sites, and the same problem occurs. The format/container doesn't seem to make a difference: same result with h264, WebM (VP8 and VP9), ogv.

Next, I tried Firefox, with the same result. Installed Opera, same result.

Unfortunately, I don't know what could have triggered this because I hadn't watched any videos in a few days. I'm sure I updated my system in the interim, so I used the Rollback Machine to downgrade my entire system to a week ago, two weeks ago...and no change in behavior.

At this point, I suspected some strange codec issue, so I uninstalled all discrete codec/plugin packages and all packages that might incorporate codecs within them. So mplayer, ffmpeg, all gstreamer packages -- everything went out. The behavior in Chromium did not change, nor did Chromium complain about missing codecs. Opera's behavior became stranger still -- it somehow detected that there was a problem on Youtube, and so long as there were no pre-video ads, it would fall back to Flash (you could just see a flicker of the Youtube error screen for a split second, and it would fall back to Flash). If there was a pre-video ad, it would remain in HTML5 and display the same behavior as before -- no video, just sound, and it wouldn't switch to the actual video unless I refreshed the screen.

The worst part about this is that I haven't been able to find any errors anywhere. dmesg is quiet (not quite true, it would occasionally spit out a segfault, e.g.: chromium[16724]: segfault at 0 ip 000055ece632be90 sp 00007ffc3330a678 error 6 in chromium[55ece31d2000+4ee1000]), systemd's journal is quiet, Chromium's console only shows the annoying chromecast javascript error (but this is not new, and we've been told we have to live with it). Strace is so verbose it's hard to make anything out, but I didn't see anything pertinent. I can't get ltrace to run because of the sanboxing/multithreading (I'm not familiar with ltrace, so that's probably on me for the time being).

I gradually reinstalled the usual codecs, no change in behavior at all. Then I built the following gstreamer packages from source (AUR), since I noticed that they were a few minor versions ahead of the binary repo: gst-libav-git, gst-plugins-base-git, gstreamer-git.

pacman -Qqs gstreamer shows:

gst-libav-git
gst-plugins-bad
gst-plugins-base-git
gst-plugins-good
gstreamer-git
gstreamer-vaapi
gstreamer0.10
gstreamer0.10-base
gstreamer0.10-base-plugins

I'm out of ideas. It still feels like a codec issue -- there must be some sort of hidden codec somewhere that's breaking things, else the behavior would have changed when I took out mplayer, ffmpeg, all gstreamer packages, etc. Now that I have those codecs installed again, WebM/h264/ogv files play just fine if I download them and play them in mplayer/smplayer. They just won't stream in any browser.

To add more inconsistency and weirdness, Opera will sometimes play HTML5 videos (WebM) on various HTML5 test pages. And sometimes it will not play the very same video in the same tab after a page refresh. Or in another tab. I hate hidden magic stuff.

The device is a cheap Acer netbook, CPU is an Intel Bay Trail-M SOC, specifically the Celeron N2840, with integrated graphics. The following intel graphics packages are installed:

intel-gpu-tools
lib32-mesa
libva-intel-driver
mesa
xf86-video-intel

I'm running CK's kernel, version 4.1.10-3-ck. The result was the same with the vanilla 4.2.2.1.

If anyone managed to make it through all of that, first thanks for your perseverance, and second, any ideas of what I could try?

damdim · 2015-10-08 21:01:40

I know you said that you rolled back your machine, but maybe you are affected by this bug:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/46537
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92265

What is your mesa version?

Last edited by damdim (2015-10-08 21:03:37)

ewpt3ch · 2015-10-08 22:54:52

I've been having the same problem. I had to downgrade mesa to 11.0.1 and also mesa-libgl-11.0.1 and mesa-vdpau.11.0.1 to get youtube working again on firefox. Hope this helps you too.

rallyemax · 2015-10-10 02:58:42

Thanks for your replies. Unfortunately, downgrading mesa didn't do the trick. But the problem is even weirder. More weird magic.

If I go to W3's HTML5 video test page, the WebM video will usually play just fine. If I then go to Youtube in that tab or in another tab, I can usually get it to work after hitting refresh anywhere from 1-5 times. But if I do the multiple refresh thing without going to the HTML5 test page, no joy.

This makes zero sense on so many levels. Cross tab effects imply that it's not Chromium itself that's the problem, because separate tabs are fully sandboxed, right? Well, sorta...don't they all share a common GPU thread? And why the hell would running the test video change anything? I only discovered this by accident, but have since tested it a dozen or so times.

The most frustrating thing is I don't know how to look for errors. The obvious suspects (dmesg, xorg log, systemd journal) show nothing.

Can anyone offer any advice on how to at least increase the verbosity of some logging service so I can see some errors?

Opera kinda works. It will use HTML5 successfully to show me Youtube ads, and upon switching to the actual video, it will very briefly show the Youtube whitenoise error page before switching to Flash and successfully playing the Flash video. The switch to Flash happens too quickly to click the error link in the Youtube player window (on the order of 0.1 seconds).

Other than very occasional new package version issues, which sometimes produce strange, difficult-to-diagnose behaviors, I have never encountered anything this fickle in the *nix world in something like 10-15 years. And those issues are caught very, very early, because they affect a large share of the userbase, and so are fixed very, very quickly. This is a problem that seems more or less unique to my system -- the combination of hardware, installed packages, configuration, etc. But the lack of any discernible error messages and the strange fickleness of the problem is reminding me of the dark days of running Windows, and the occasional need to reinstall the OS to solve the weird issue. I refuse to do this on a Linux box.

If I can't make the system somehow tell me what's causing the errors, my next step is to back my system up fully and start gradually stripping it down to base install level, while periodically checking to see if the error has gone away. Not a fun project. I'd rather clean and reorganize my garage than do that.

kernel2048 · 2015-10-12 10:36:19

ewpt3ch wrote:

I had to downgrade mesa to 11.0.1 and also mesa-libgl-11.0.1

Thanks. This workaround worked for me too, since i have same problem with HTML5 video in all browsers after recent update on my i686 system.

rallyemax · 2015-10-15 23:49:39

The problem persists after uninstalling all AUR and locally compiled software, and more or less stripping my system down to what it would look like maybe three days after a brand new installation. I've also reinstalled all packages on my system (pacman -Qenq | pacman -S -), and before doing that did a general cleaning of orphaned packages and a merge of all .pacsave/.pacoriginal/.pacnew/etc configurations on my system.

I'm as clueless as I was before. Youtube videos sometimes work after starting chromium, but usually not, and never after one successful play. It doesn't matter if it is a fresh chromium install with all configuration/cache/profile info wiped or an install with my backed up profile info restored. Videos on the HTML5 test site linked above do work, but not every time. Sometimes it takes a screen refresh to do it, sometimes it's not needed. There is no consistency.

I installed Arch on an unused partition on the same system, and a barebones installation similar to what I am having problems with (base + xorg + xfce4 + chromium) plays all HTML5 videos fine. So it's not the hardware.

The next step is to slowly strip this installation down and get to more or less the status of that barebones one...hopefully I'll catch the culprit. If that doesn't work, I'll build up from the barebones one and hopefully catch the problem as I start adding in my old configuration. Not the quickest way of getting a working system, but I really want to figure this thing out.

crimhead · 2015-12-04 01:56:56

I'm curious if you ever figured out a root cause for this -- I've also been experiencing this exact issue for several months now. I have a workaround in the meantime (youtube-dl) but it's kind of a hassle.

jedihawk · 2015-12-06 01:01:15

My situation is similar: Video plays a few frames, then stops. Youtube (flash or HTML5), mplayer, any video player only plays a few frames, then pauses freeze-frame. If I jump ahead, it jumps, plays a few frames, then pauses again. If I frame-step ahead, it'll do that for about 5 frames, then pause and not continue after that.

I've tried un-installing / re-installing gstreamer0.10-plugins and all the others (good, bad, ugly, etc). Nothing seems to affect this. I have to switch to my Redmond-based OS to watch videos. That makes me a Sad Hawk.

On the other hand, audio plays fine. I'm using Aqualung as my audio player and it plays all kinds of audio files including streaming from Party107.

I'd be interested in any info on a fix for this.

Also, is there a way I can get a core dump or a stack trace or some kind of debugging information to help debug this?

-SadHawk

jedihawk · 2015-12-06 04:09:28

POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

# pacman -S nvidia nvidia-libgl

On my system, I had Mesa installed. The above command told me that nvidia-libgl conflicted with mesa's libgl (or something along that line). Uninstall the mesa one and install the nvidia one. Reboot. Fixed.

At least, thus far. Youtube plays perfect, even in HD 1080p. mplayer plays anything I throw at it, perfectly, with seeking and pausing and frame-stepping and so on.

As I recall, sometimes this video playback bug happens a few days after I've rebooted. I'll report if it stops working.

-HappyHawk

jedihawk · 2015-12-06 07:52:25

NOPE!

That "fix" didn't work. Just hours after rebooting, videos don't play any more (after the first four frames).

-SadHawk

V1del · 2015-12-06 10:56:25

Uninstall gstreamer-vaapi if you have it, it is known to be buggy.

Last edited by V1del (2015-12-06 10:57:01)

jedihawk · 2015-12-06 18:29:05

error: target not found: gstreamer-vaapi

V1del · 2015-12-06 19:57:02

start the browser in a terminal and check which errors you get

jedihawk · 2015-12-06 20:07:27

I'll do my browser in a bit. But first, here's mplayer's output:

$ mplayer Traverse\ City\ LipDub\ 2011.mp4 
MPlayer SVN-r37379 (C) 2000-2015 MPlayer Team
210 audio & 441 video codecs
do_connect: could not connect to socket
connect: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing Traverse City LipDub 2011.mp4.
libavformat version 56.25.101 (internal)
libavformat file format detected.
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0
[lavf] stream 1: audio (aac), -aid 0, -alang und
VIDEO:  [H264]  1920x1080  24bpp  29.970 fps  4467.0 kbps (545.3 kbyte/s)
Clip info:
 major_brand: isom
 minor_version: 1
 compatible_brands: isomavc1
 creation_time: 2011-08-07 20:18:10
Load subtitles in ./
==========================================================================
Forced video codec: ffmpeg12vdpau
Forced video codec: ffwmv3vdpau
Forced video codec: ffvc1vdpau
Forced video codec: ffh264vdpau
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
libavcodec version 56.26.100 (internal)
Selected video codec: [ffh264vdpau] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264 (VDPAU))
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, floatle, 217.0 kbit/7.69% (ratio: 27128->352800)
Selected audio codec: [ffaac] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
==========================================================================
[AO OSS] audio_setup: Can't open audio device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
AO: [alsa] 44100Hz 2ch floatle (4 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [vdpau] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 H.264 VDPAU acceleration 
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [vdpau] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 H.264 VDPAU acceleration 
A:   0.0 V:   0.2 A-V: -0.177 ct: -0.010   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 

Exiting... (Quit)


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: exit_player
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
  Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
  disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
  It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
  gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
  DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
  won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

Note the line just above "Exiting... (Quit)", the one which starts with "A: ". That line changes as the video is played. Well, normally it changes. Right after booting up, I run the above command and the video plays fine, and that line updates as the video plays. A few hours after booting up, the video doesn't play, and that line doesn't update. What could change in a few hours?

The sig 11 happens after I quit the player. I hit the Q key, or close the window, and then get that error. It doesn't effect playback.

jedihawk · 2015-12-08 20:57:39

Now it works. <shrug>?

I have made no changes to packages installed, uninstalled, etc. I haven't run pacman at all. My browser is still running from when I booted up, and I haven't re-booted yet.

mplayer works fine. It still complains about a signal 11 when quitting, but it plays the video perfectly, in window-mode or full-screen, with seeking and volume controls and everything else... all normal.

Youtube videos play in Firefox without problem, full-screen or otherwise.

<shrug>?

-HappyHawk

P.S. I wish there were a way I could help debug this issue.

quimkaos · 2015-12-08 22:59:16

I started today having a similar problem, but only with Firefox (v.42). I can play html5 video in Firefox 44 (aurora) and chromium. Forcing Firefox 42 to play html5 video sometimes even crashes Firefox... The thing is, it was working perfectly 24 hours ago...

quimkaos · 2015-12-09 15:03:13

running Firefox in terminal gives the following errors:

firefox "http://www.w3.org/2010/05/video/mediaevents.html"

no errors until i start playing the video

libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns -1
libva error: va_getDriverName() failed with unknown libva error,driver_name=(null)
libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: VA-API version 0.38.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns -1
libva error: va_getDriverName() failed with unknown libva error,driver_name=(null)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

V1del · 2015-12-09 15:05:24

@quimkaos

V1del wrote:

Uninstall gstreamer-vaapi if you have it, it is known to be buggy.

quimkaos · 2015-12-09 15:29:14

damn it to hell!! i thought i already uninstalled gstreamer-vaapi... without it, it's working now!

THANKS V1del

P.S.
This was also responsible for Gnome Videos not working with some videos, and even for some playback issues with VLC.

Last edited by quimkaos (2015-12-09 15:43:49)

V1del · 2015-12-09 15:49:54

VLC is unlikely unless you manually moved it away/to VAAPI, unless you wiped anything vaapi off your disc together with gstreamer-vaapi (hint: if you need hardware acceleration you should be using VDPAU with nvidia)

Last edited by V1del (2015-12-09 15:51:02)

quimkaos · 2015-12-09 16:31:46

i don't think i'm using vaapi anywhere (libvdpau-va-gl and gstreamer-vaapi are not installed) and i do have libvdpau and mesa-vdpau installed. I know most of this libraries are internal to vlc, so probably i still have something around there.

crimhead · 2015-12-10 00:16:12

The issue that was originally described (and what I'm experiencing) is specific to HTML5 based video on YouTube/Vimeo (same issue occurs in Chrome/Chromium/Firefox). Flash-based, mplayer/vlc and such are not impacted. Twitch.tv's HTML5 video works fine as well. I don't have gstreamer-vaapi installed, and there are absolutely no error messages anywhere to be seen.

[root@electron ~]# pacman -Q | egrep "^(mesa|nvidia|gst)"
gst-editing-services 1.6.1-1
gst-libav 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-bad 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base-libs 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-good 1.6.1-2
gst-plugins-ugly 1.6.1-1
gst-python 1.6.1-1
gstreamer 1.6.1-1
gstreamer0.10 0.10.36-4
gstreamer0.10-bad 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-base 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-base-plugins 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0.10.13-2
gstreamer0.10-good 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-good-plugins 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-python 0.10.22-2
gstreamer0.10-ugly 0.10.19-15
gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins 0.10.19-15
mesa 11.0.6-1
mesa-demos 8.2.0-5
nvidia-340xx 340.96-2.1
nvidia-340xx-libgl 340.96-1
nvidia-340xx-utils 340.96-1

Last edited by crimhead (2015-12-10 02:00:39)

quimkaos · 2015-12-10 03:47:59

since i'm using the same drivers and was suffering with this, please compare:

gst-libav 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-bad 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base-libs 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-good 1.6.1-2
gst-plugins-ugly 1.6.1-1
gstreamer 1.6.1-1
gstreamer0.10 0.10.36-4
gstreamer0.10-bad 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-base 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-base-plugins 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0.10.13-2
gstreamer0.10-good 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-good-plugins 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-ugly 0.10.19-15
gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins 0.10.19-15
mesa 11.0.6-1
mesa-vdpau 11.0.6-1
nvidia-340xx 340.96-2.1
nvidia-340xx-libgl 340.96-1
nvidia-340xx-utils 340.96-1

Last edited by quimkaos (2015-12-10 03:50:04)

jedihawk · 2015-12-10 05:32:56

Mine:

# pacman -Q | egrep '^(mesa|nvidia|gst)'
gst-libav 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-bad 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base-libs 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-good 1.6.1-2
gst-plugins-ugly 1.6.1-1
gstreamer 1.6.1-1
gstreamer0.10 0.10.36-4
gstreamer0.10-bad 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-base 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-base-plugins 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0.10.13-2
gstreamer0.10-good 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-good-plugins 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-ugly 0.10.19-15
gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins 0.10.19-15
mesa 11.0.6-1
nvidia 358.16-2.1
nvidia-libgl 358.16-1
nvidia-utils 358.16-1

I just tried YouTube with Firefox v42.0 and the standard Flash player and it's working fine. Switching to HTML5...

https://www.youtube.com/html5

Yeah, the HTML5 player works fine. A bit better, even. Works extra-wide, and full-screen. Yayyy!

On to twitch.tv... Works fine. Small player, re-sized on-the-fly, full-screen... different quality settings... just went through half a dozen livestreams and all good. No problems at all. I love it!

-HappyHawk

mynameistaken · 2015-12-11 13:22:37

I'm also having problems with this

# pacman -Q | egrep '^(mesa|nvidia|gst)'
gst-plugins-base 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-base-libs 1.6.1-1
gst-plugins-good 1.6.1-2
gstreamer 1.6.1-1
gstreamer0.10 0.10.36-4
gstreamer0.10-bad 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins 0.10.23-11
gstreamer0.10-base 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-base-plugins 0.10.36-3
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0.10.13-2
gstreamer0.10-good 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-good-plugins 0.10.31-9
gstreamer0.10-python 0.10.22-2
gstreamer0.10-ugly 0.10.19-15
gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins 0.10.19-15
mesa 11.0.6-1
mesa-demos 8.2.0-5
mesa-libgl 11.0.6-1

I can't really follow the thread here to figure out what I need to do. Any simple step-by-step?

Arch Linux

#1 2015-10-08 20:22:18

HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#2 2015-10-08 21:01:40

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#3 2015-10-08 22:54:52

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#4 2015-10-10 02:58:42

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#5 2015-10-12 10:36:19

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#6 2015-10-15 23:49:39

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#7 2015-12-04 01:56:56

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#8 2015-12-06 01:01:15

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#9 2015-12-06 04:09:28

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#10 2015-12-06 07:52:25

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#11 2015-12-06 10:56:25

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#12 2015-12-06 18:29:05

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#13 2015-12-06 19:57:02

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#14 2015-12-06 20:07:27

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#15 2015-12-08 20:57:39

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#16 2015-12-08 22:59:16

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#17 2015-12-09 15:03:13

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#18 2015-12-09 15:05:24

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#19 2015-12-09 15:29:14

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#20 2015-12-09 15:49:54

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#21 2015-12-09 16:31:46

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#22 2015-12-10 00:16:12

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#23 2015-12-10 03:47:59

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#24 2015-12-10 05:32:56

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

#25 2015-12-11 13:22:37

Re: HTML5 video suddenly stopped working; audio works fine

Board footer