YouTube HTM5 player has issues on Firefox
It seems like in the last month or so YouTube's HTML5 player has slowly been broken on firefox, whether this is due to changes in Firefox or YouTube I don't know. The biggest issue is the "infinite buffer"; this is often caused by seeking the video, the loading animation will come up but the video will not play even after a long wait. The major issue is that this will persist throughout the session and attempting to close firefox will not close the process forcing you to kill it before restarting. A more recent problem that has come up is frame dropping, it seems it will drop frames at a random rate as long as the video buffer is still being filled.
I have already taken the necessary steps to make sure no plugins, extensions, or personal settings were causing these issues.
edit: Switched to aurora 34.0a2 and enabled media.mediasource.ignore_codecs, frame dropping issue is fixed. The infinite buffer issue is still occurs 100% of the time when attempting to seek but it no longer persists though the session and the process properly closes though there is now a small chance firefox will crash while seeking (though may just be a result of aurora being an alpha build). This is true whether or not the video is actually using MSE & h264 so I do not believe it is a factor.
Modified by wroth
All Replies (6)
If Firefox should crash, a crash report will be generated be the watchdog. Sending the report will show up at the developers system for them to check out. If you want, you can post the report numbers for us to look at. Just follow these instructions.
In the address bar, type about:crashes. Note: If any reports do not have BP in front of the numbers, click it and select Submit.
Using your mouse, mark the most resent 7 - 10 crash reports, and copy them. Now go to the reply box below and paste them in.
Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache.
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Type about:preferences<Enter> in the address bar.
- Cookies; Select Privacy. Under History, select Firefox will Use Custom Settings. Press the button on the right side called Show Cookies. Use the search bar to look for the site. Note; There may be more than one entry. Remove All of them.
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If there is still a problem, Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} While you are in safe mode;
Type about:preferences<Enter> in the address bar
Select Advanced > General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.
Poke around safe web sites. Are there any problems?
Then restart.
Already submitted the 2 crashes bp-b39affc6-1b60-4b9d-8f28-829f52140928 bp-33268a6e-d882-47f0-a042-4f7002140928
Modified by cor-el
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} While you are in safe mode;
Type about:preferences<Enter> in the address bar
Select Advanced > General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.
Poke around safe web sites. Are there any problems?
Then restart.
Some added toolbar and anti-virus add-ons are known to cause Firefox issues. Disable All of them.
If I'm reading this right, the only crashes I've had deal with the mp4 demuxer. I may have been wrong about the new MSE & h264 not causing it as I may have been on a video that required it as I was testing the HTML5 player on several YouTube videos and those particular videos use mp4 container for the video. I do know this feature is experimental so hopefully those 2 reports can provide some insight to work out any bugs. These crashes are rare.
But what I really wanted to report was the infinite buffer issue.
"The biggest issue is the "infinite buffer"; this is often caused by seeking the video, the loading animation will come up but the video will not play even after a long wait."
"The infinite buffer issue is still occurs 100% of the time when attempting to seek but it no longer persists though the session and the process properly closes"
Through using a new profile and another browser I've concluded the issue must be with Firefox itself.
It seems that Firefox isn't the only browser being affected; Dolphin with it's Jetpack extension (html5 test score only 12 points lower html5te.st/7748d622f452c095 ) on android also has this exact same seeking issue. So my guess would be this is caused by a hole in the html5 implementation, given the player is almost guaranteed to be tested only on chrome (which has an html5 test score 35 points higher http://html5te.st/a01f0922f45b8df0 ). This is compared to the latest Aurora 34.0a2 http://html5te.st/b1e86a22f44fb2c9.
edit: Opera beta (html5 test score 508 http://html5te.st/4418f122f473a0af ) does NOT have this issue
Modified by wroth