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Youtube videos immediately pause

  • 3 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by beedy

beedy
beedy

Youtube videos stopped working properly: when I open a video page (https://www.youtube.com/abcde) I can only make it go forward by continuously clicking the play button. The video immediately pauses all the time. At first, clicking play played only 1 frame or so. Eventually, after I changed FF's autoplay setting from "Block Audio" to "Allow Audio and Video" videos play a few frames at a time. I do hear the audio (in sync with the video, so also a few frames at a time). It happens with every video I try.

Embedded videos (https://www.youtube.com/embed/abcde) and Youtube's mini player work fine. Video pages do work in a new profile, but I would like to keep my current profile.

Things I've also tried, to no avail:

  • disabling all add-ons
  • new privacy window
  • switching tracking protection between standard and strict
  • disabling hardware acceleration
  • disabling media controls
  • disabling smooth scrolling
  • deleting Youtube and Google cookies

This is with the Firefox version on Debian bullseye (91.11.0).

The only similar description I found was on Reddit [1], except that it's a different FF version and it only happens with 1 profile.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/x00882/firefox_104_broke_youtube_all_videos_pause_on/

Youtube videos stopped working properly: when I open a video page (https://www.youtube.com/abcde) I can only make it go forward by continuously clicking the play button. The video immediately pauses all the time. At first, clicking play played only 1 frame or so. Eventually, after I changed FF's autoplay setting from "Block Audio" to "Allow Audio and Video" videos play a few frames at a time. I do hear the audio (in sync with the video, so also a few frames at a time). It happens with every video I try. Embedded videos (https://www.youtube.com/embed/abcde) and Youtube's mini player work fine. Video pages do work in a new profile, but I would like to keep my current profile. Things I've also tried, to no avail: * disabling all add-ons * new privacy window * switching tracking protection between standard and strict * disabling hardware acceleration * disabling media controls * disabling smooth scrolling * deleting Youtube and Google cookies This is with the Firefox version on Debian bullseye (91.11.0). The only similar description I found was on Reddit [1], except that it's a different FF version and it only happens with 1 profile. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/x00882/firefox_104_broke_youtube_all_videos_pause_on/

All Replies (3)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator

You can look at these prefs on the about:config page to see what settings work for you and possibly reset prefs that aren't default (i.e. are bolded).

  • media.autoplay.default = 5 [0:allow;1:blockAudible;5:blockAll]
  • media.autoplay.blocking_policy = 2
  • media.autoplay.allow-extension-background-pages
  • media.autoplay.block-event.enabled
  • media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.

beedy
beedy Question owner

@Dropa: the links I gave are dummy links, I just wanted to show the type of link.

@cor-el: I changed all those settings and back and tried some combinations. Unfortunately, the symptoms remain unchanged.

beedy
beedy Question owner

I replaced the profile's prefs.js with the one from a profile that doesn't have the problem. No change, so it's very likely independent of prefs.js. Is there anything else that I could check?

After careful observation it seems to me that the video plays until the right panel with suggestions has fully loaded. When I refresh a video (ctrl-r) it always starts to play, but the time where it stops varies a little bit (fractions of a second) and coincides with the rendering of the last image in the right panel.