Video freezes but audio continues if tab loses focus
Hello, I have recently moved to a new OS, windows 10 pro x64. I have installed firefox 98.0.1 (64-bit) and am experiencing an issue I never had with old versions, it has always been true of chrome but never firefox builds in my experience. If I have a tab open with a video, whether its a livestream or just a youtube video for example, if that tab loses focus within seconds the video will freeze but the audio will continue. Then when I return to that tab/window the video will be set to the lowest possible quality ( despite having a gigabit service) and it takes a while for the video to refresh and then a little while longer for the audio to sync back up. The video has always stopped playing if I use the windows "show desktop" shortcut on the bottom right of the screen, but in every previous version of firefox I have used, swapping tabs and/or windows never had this issue before.
It is a clean install, I do not have any extensions and am not connected to a vpn. I have tried
- turning hardware acceleration off - disabling webgl - changing the throttle option in about:config - checked the network settings within firefox just to double check the proxy settings.
Few things I to note All of my drivers are up to date, there are no readily apparent reasons on my end for this. My system is pretty decent I think, ryzen 7 1700x, 32gb ram, 1 tb m.2, 1080ti Also turns out the video will start to load if I hover over the window in taskbar so that the preview pops up, however in that case I still need to open the window back up because it treats it like I have just opened that website and I have to click in the video to start playback
Other than digging through firefox old versions and testing them 1 at a time to find the one I use to have I am not sure what I should try next. Thank you
Modified by howamo
All Replies (6)
You can create a new profile as a quick test to see if your current profile is causing the problem.
See "Creating a profile":
If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.
Thank you, unfortunately that did not work.
However I need to make a tweak to my original post, it turns out that hovering over the window in the taskbar actually makes the problem worse in the sense that it speeds it up.
If I have a video playing and I go to a different window the video plays for maybe a minute then stops while the audio continues.
However
If I have a video playing and go to a different window but for any reason hover over the video window in the taskbar, when the video preview pops up, even if for a split second the video stops instantly, so what I said is still true, if I see the preview in the taskbar the video appears as though its attempting to re-load but I need to open the window and click to start playback, but I now know that both the window losing focus and/or the preview being seen in taskbar are 2 seperate events both of which cause the video to stop playing
Modified by howamo
More information. I have discovered 2 new things about this
1: In direct condratiction to my experience over the past few years, this is happening in firefox but not brave and chrome
2:OBS strangely also causes this, but again, only in firefox. Example, if I have firefox open with a video playing and OBS is running but it isnt currently being used, if I open OBS interface the video instantly stops. OBS has nothing to do with firefox,it is set up for game capture, neither window or display capture have ever been used with this install so the videos/streams in browsers have no obvious reason to be affected by OBS, but I have tried again and again to verify and sure enough, opening OBS = firefox videos stop but audio continues
I found a post on reddit , I know it talks about games specifically but I figured theres no harm in trying it out and I can always change it back, but this appears to have done the trick
"It's still some time until the release of Firefox 96 (January 11th 2022), but if you are using the Developer Edition/Beta Version then you might have realized that your idle games no longer keep progressing when they run in the background (and use requestAnimationFrame for their ticks). Previously this only happened when it was running in a separate tab, but with version 96 it'll also happen if it's a separate window that's occluded.
But they also added a flag to disable this behavior:
Enter about:config in your URL bar
Search for the widget.windows.window_occlusion_tracking.enabled key
Change the value from true to false"
Since following these types the problem seems to be fixed, although it has only been a short amount of time, so I will report back later on to say if the problem appears to be fully resolved.
Modified by howamo
Update: The above post has not fixed the issue entirely but has helped drastically. I can't think of reasons where I would need a video to play in the background for very long periods of time but for the sake of being thorough I have ran a few tests where I had videos running for hours in the backround. Most of the time they ran and any time I checked I had not noticed any freezing issues, a few times when I checked the video had froze but in those cases the video had froze at anywhere from 20-40 minutes into the play time which is significantly better than the 1-2 minutes when I opened this question.
So it isnt 100% fixed, but for all intents and purposes the above post is the solution, at least for me, if you need hours of background content, good luck to you
See also bug 1759393
- 1759393 - Firefox stops rendering videos (the whole web-page) after 10 seconds when in background
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