Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

Felfa · 2016-11-18 22:29:49

Same problem here (I thought I was the only one, lol).

With Firefox recently opened there's apparently no issues with playback on YouTube videos, but randomly I can suddenly get stuck at any video looping at first frames. This also happens with a clean profile.

I have Intel HD Graphics 4000 with Mesa DRI Intel Ivybridge Mobile, with Hardware acceleration enabled, but back in Firefox 49 I had no issues.

agapito · 2016-11-19 08:47:48

I had this problem in Firefox 49 too.

loqs · 2016-11-19 16:02:45

agapito wrote:

I had this problem in Firefox 49 too.

All other reporters have noted it is limited to firefox 50 so although the symptoms are the same I would suspect the cause is different.
If you know which version of firefox did not contain the issue you could run mozregression then file a seperate bug report.

From upstream

loic wrote:

We need a regression range. Could you run Mozregression and copy the pushlog, please.

As upstream will not take action without the output from mozregression, if some other people apart from beta990 could run mozregression and post the output to the upstream bugreport.

achdumeineguete · 2016-11-19 23:35:19

Have had the same Problem.
Actually it seems to be solved by setting 'layers.acceleration.force-enabled' to false

mrlamud · 2016-11-20 01:04:45

For anyone who has this problem, could you check if "Multiprocess Windows" in about:support was enable?

If it was not, try to enable or force enable it to see if problem might be solved.

More information about "Multiprocess Windows" , how to enable or force enable is here https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview

hungerfish · 2016-11-20 11:44:23

Actually it seems to be solved by setting 'layers.acceleration.force-enabled' to false

This seems to have fixed the problem for me too, however I feel that video playback is more choppy/laggy now (not frame dropping though!).
I guess this relates to

HW_COMPOSITING: blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform

from about:support page which was being overwritten by having acceleration force enabled. I'm on mesa/amdgpu driver btw, seeing this problem also affects intel users, their mileage may vary?!

check if "Multiprocess Windows" in about:support was enable?

For me:

Multiprocess Windows: 	0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)

Toggling "browser.tabs.remote.autostart" seemed to have no effect on that output, nor on the problem, at least for me.
Side note, How can I find out which addon is disabling it??
Did it the old fashioned way, one at a time... for me its caused by SDC (self-destructing cookies)

EDIT:
So, Once I disabled said addon and thus got "Multiprocess Windows" enabled, I could re-enable "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" and not get the playback problems, so I guess this is all related somehow..

Last edited by hungerfish (2016-11-20 12:12:17)

Texbrew · 2016-11-20 19:51:39

@hungerfish, I have self-destructing cookies on every one of my machines, and noticed odd youtube behaviour, but I though it was slow internet speed.

You said you disabled SDC, was that enough or did you have to uninstall it?

I hate tracking cookies and all forms of tracking/snooping (do you hear that, google?).

hungerfish · 2016-11-20 20:21:23

I disabled it to get "Multiprocess Windows" working, I did not have to uninstall. However I have since re-enabled it thereby foregoing "Multiprocess Windows", but thanks to achdumeineguete's workaround can still watch youtube vids.
HW acceleration is disabled though, which creates screen tearing for me, hoping that SDC's author fixes his plugin soon!

Eko2016 · 2016-11-20 20:52:08

no SDC addon here
(HWaccel on, though)

cirrus9 · 2016-11-21 01:22:40

I have had the same problem. Applying the afore mentioned work arounds does seem to have fixed it. I don't have the SDC addon. I do have HW accel on, but that has been on forever. Only had the problem since Firefox 50. I hadn't noticed this until today, as I usually play vids in Chromium.

eNTi · 2016-11-21 08:16:46

hungerfish wrote:

Actually it seems to be solved by setting 'layers.acceleration.force-enabled' to false
This seems to have fixed the problem for me too, however I feel that video playback is more choppy/laggy now (not frame dropping though!).
I guess this relates to
HW_COMPOSITING: blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
from about:support page which was being overwritten by having acceleration force enabled. I'm on mesa/amdgpu driver btw, seeing this problem also affects intel users, their mileage may vary?!
check if "Multiprocess Windows" in about:support was enable?
For me:
Multiprocess Windows: 	0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)
Toggling "browser.tabs.remote.autostart" seemed to have no effect on that output, nor on the problem, at least for me.
Side note, How can I find out which addon is disabling it??
Did it the old fashioned way, one at a time... for me its caused by SDC (self-destructing cookies)
EDIT:
So, Once I disabled said addon and thus got "Multiprocess Windows" enabled, I could re-enable "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" and not get the playback problems, so I guess this is all related somehow..

Thx. This fixed it for me... even on Windows.

Archonaut · 2016-11-21 10:32:40

I also had problems streaming youtube after upgrading to Firefox 50, although with different symptoms.
After starting, the video seemed to play just fine, but when clicking on the full screen button in the lower right, the behavior was quite weird:
- a short flicker of the *whole* screen
- the video was *not* maximized, but kept on playing
- any mouse clicks on the page content did not have any effect (for the current or any other tabs)
- the FF interface areas (tabs, menu) responded to clicks, but when switching to a different tab the old tab containing the youtube video would disappear (but it would still play, I could hear it)
- anyway, no loops as most of the people seem to report

The same videos were playing just fine in FF 49. I haven't touched any FF about:config settings (hwaccel, etc.) in months.
I have the "Multiprocess Windows (Disabled by add-ons)"; a slightly older nvidia card.

Then I did an upgrade and the nvidia drivers got upgraded from 375.10-1 to 375.20-1.
After that the problem went away: the same videos that had problems now play fine, I can full-screen and restore any of them many times without a hitch.

hungerfish · 2016-11-27 14:48:54

From gentoo's bug tracker:

So the problem seems to be specific to "e10s off" plus "hw accel on"

This is the combination that leads broken html5 vids (and gifs?).
As has been asked for in the upstream bugreport,
if you can, try and reproduce the problematic behaviour using mozilla's Mozregression tool.
I've tried myselft, but could not reproduce the problem using those builds...so more testing is needed!

Domker_ · 2016-11-28 11:29:04

I have have this bug too.
Video is stuck in a loop of the first seconds of the stream, but I don't think that this is the fault HW acceleration. If You clean the browser cache and after that refresh the YouTube a problem for some time disappears.

Audio in Spotify Web Player loop sometimes too.

(Firefox 50, Manjaro Linux 16.10 x86_64 kernel 4.8.9-1
GPU: GeForce GTX980
Vsync: On
HWacc: On )

FlowIt · 2016-11-28 12:06:30

@Domker_: Check if e10s is enabled under about:support (Multiprocess Windows). The looping video was fixed for me when NoScript was updated and brought e10s compatibility, thus enabling e10s for my Firefox installation.

Texbrew · 2016-11-29 01:01:27

FlowIt wrote:

@Domker_: Check if e10s is enabled under about:support (Multiprocess Windows). The looping video was fixed for me when NoScript was updated and brought e10s compatibility, thus enabling e10s for my Firefox installation.

The relevant line in my about:support page reads:

Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)

How do you get NoScript updated? Remove & re-install, or something else?

Inixi · 2016-11-29 14:57:42

Since I have removed an addon that was preventing Multiprocess Windows from being on I have no problems with Youtube videos.

FlowIt · 2016-11-29 16:28:18

@Texbrew: NoScript was just an example. You can go to about:addons and right click on every item in the list, then select 'Find Updates'.
As far as I know there is no way to tell which addon disables e10s. So you should disable all of them first and then enable one after another to find the offending ones. However, even if you find an update to such an addon, this doesn't automatically mean that it is now e10s-compatible. If in doubt, contact the addon maintainer.
Or you just install Firefox Nightly from the AUR, supposedly the bug is fixed there.

Texbrew · 2016-11-29 17:02:29

@FlowIt, Thank you for clarifying. As I have several linux boxes and firefox is the only browser I use, I am bookmarking this thread for reference.

Gooberslot · 2016-11-30 05:54:26

I have this bug too. I had to disable way too many useful add-ons to get e10s working so I had to settle for disabling hw acceleration. I think it's time to give Vivaldi another try.

Inixi · 2016-11-30 09:34:41

@Gooberslot, regarding Youtube HTML5 tests Vivaldi does not support H.264 encoding, MSE and Widevine EME. This also concerns Opera browser, but still most of videos work...

Gooberslot · 2016-12-02 06:05:22

Inixi, on my system Vivaldi supports everything on the Youtube HTML5 test. Do you have the vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs installed?

edit: fixed typo.

Last edited by Gooberslot (2016-12-03 04:22:22)

thof · 2016-12-04 12:58:30

I'm not sure if it is only related to Firefox since I noticed exactly the same issue in VLC with Acestream channels.

toxygen · 2017-01-04 02:06:51

this workaround seems to fix it for me:

First, open a new tab and type about:support in the address bar.
Look for the line that says “Multiprocess Windows” and see if it’s enabled, since you’re suffering this issue it probably isn’t – 0/1 means it isn’t.
To enable “Multiprocess Windows” you’ll need to open up another tab -> type about:config in the address bar -> search for and toggle browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true.
You may need to restart Firefox for changes to take effect.
Now, if you’re met with a disabled message appearing next to the value due to e.g. add-ons can trigger this, then you may choose one of the following options:
Either disable the add-on that causes the disabled state – this is the recommended option. Or, force enable the state by creating a new boolean preference (in about:config) named browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and set it to true – not encouraged, use it at your own risk!

i used the latter: browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and set it to true

Inixi · 2017-01-11 09:37:40

@Gooberslot, sorry for no response. I haven't noticed that there are some patches for vivaldi, I will check in a moment, thanks!

Arch Linux

#26 2016-11-18 22:29:49

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#27 2016-11-19 08:47:48

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#28 2016-11-19 16:02:45

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#29 2016-11-19 23:35:19

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#30 2016-11-20 01:04:45

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#31 2016-11-20 11:44:23

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#32 2016-11-20 19:51:39

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#33 2016-11-20 20:21:23

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#34 2016-11-20 20:52:08

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#35 2016-11-21 01:22:40

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#36 2016-11-21 08:16:46

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#37 2016-11-21 10:32:40

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#38 2016-11-27 14:48:54

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#39 2016-11-28 11:29:04

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#40 2016-11-28 12:06:30

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#41 2016-11-29 01:01:27

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#42 2016-11-29 14:57:42

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#43 2016-11-29 16:28:18

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#44 2016-11-29 17:02:29

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#45 2016-11-30 05:54:26

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#46 2016-11-30 09:34:41

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#47 2016-12-02 06:05:22

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#48 2016-12-04 12:58:30

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#49 2017-01-04 02:06:51

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

#50 2017-01-11 09:37:40

Re: Firefox 50 - Weird issues playing YT video's

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