Arch Linux

almindor

Member

Registered: 2015-10-10

Posts: 45

Firefox crash with nvidia/vdpau

Firefox (since 40+) seems to be consistently crashing on HTML5 and video playback. It seems to happen when switching pages where html5/video is used.

I found this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=199877 but it doesn't fix it for me. I removed the mesa-vdpau and libvdpau-va-gl packages but firefox still crashes.

If I remove the libva-vdpau-driver package the crashing stops but I only get audio, the video on youtube for example is blank and there are vdpau driver search errors in the console.

The crash is just a segfault, no other info, no debug symbols present. Any ideas? I have an nvidia GeForce 660 with the proprietary driver. I tried reinstalling nvidia-utils too but that didn't help either.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: Firefox crash with nvidia/vdpau

The key package to uninstall is gstreamer-vaapi and since you didn't mention that here, did you make sure to uninstall it? Depending on the kind of segfault it might also be a microcode issue, are you on a intel cpu and haven't updated the microcode? If not do so.

Also post any kind of output you get, maybe even the segfault itself. Even without symbols they often help to pinpoint the issue to a degree.

almindor

Member

Registered: 2015-10-10

Posts: 45

Re: Firefox crash with nvidia/vdpau

The key package to uninstall is gstreamer-vaapi and since you didn't mention that here, did you make sure to uninstall it? Depending on the kind of segfault it might also be a microcode issue, are you on a intel cpu and haven't updated the microcode? If not do so.

Also post any kind of output you get, maybe even the segfault itself. Even without symbols they often help to pinpoint the issue to a degree.

Removing gstreamer-vaapi seems to have fixed the issue.

I wonder if this should be put somewhere in the wiki? Why does this package cause the crashing? Shouldn't nvidia-utils or some other package be mutualy exclusive with it then?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: Firefox crash with nvidia/vdpau

With gstreamer-vaapi video output tries to use the VAAPI hardware decoding method, which only reliably works on intel cards. There is a bridge to VDPAU (which is used by Nvidia/nouveau/radeon) in the form of  libvdpau-va-gl but as evident this bridge doesn't work anymore, or rather to even attempt to make it work you would need to do some configuration as outlined in the article I linked. However since most players natively support VDPAU it isn't really necessary. It would be a bit of a stretch to add a multimedia package as a conflict to a driver package since they technically aren't related.

Adding this to the wiki might be a good idea.