I just download the clip and watch it when I want. Some websites can set themselves up to avoid this, but some download managers can get around that.

Thanks for the answer, but that was not really the point of the request, as I would like to use Firefox normally, without download managers or something external like that, as there're a host of possible sites with videos and different rules.

Any suggestion please? I also wonder if there're actually users that are able to buffer the entire video, probably there're, and what's the way to accomplish it?

The other thread that you linked, regarding "about:config" "media.cache" resulted in an offical bug-report, but it has not led to any "fruits", yet. The basic problem is the eventual discrepancy between your internetspeed and the basic idea of the mediasource funcion used nowadays basically everywhere, wich negotiates a loading of videoslices or minibuffers. The next slice is not transferred until your playback hits a certain point of the minibuffer, wich leads to the minibuffer running empty if your internetspeed is slower than the Mbps of the content you try to watch without interrupts. This function was initially invented to get rid of the worldwide bandwidth used for buffered but never watched content.

it is possible that the size of the bufferslices isn´t controlled only by the client/consumer of the content, maybe the websites got also updated controls wich makes these chunksizes fixed since a few month.

you could turn off the mediasource funktion completely by setting this to false media.mediasource.enabled in about:config For youtube this disables the bufferslicing and prevents resolutions higher than 720p, but other websites may get unable to show any video at all.

Note the proper names of the prefs (I noticed some typos when I searched):

• media.cache_readahead_limit = 999999
• media.cache_resume_threshold = 999999

cor-el said

Note the proper names of the prefs (I noticed some typos when I searched):

• media.cache_readahead_limit = 999999
• media.cache_resume_threshold = 999999

the 2 mentioned tweaks only work if "media.mediasource.enabled" is set to "false" than the two enlargements work, but not with mediasource enabled. if iám not mistaking there was a change regarding mediasourceAPI a few month back, i bet that is the root of the problem.

that is the widely known solution that worked until a few month. at the moment some, maybe all sites seam to ignore these changes you wrote. For that reason i mentioned that maybe these sites use fixed size chunksizes and ignore usersettings. Can you confirm this possibility?

to be precise, i used your settings now and disabled all addons in my firefox, so that WebRTC should work normal if that does matter in any way. i tried a VP9 youtube video in 1080p, wich i paused right at the beginning, than the statistics window says that it buffers 17sec and few seconds later it does 2 small activities bringing the buffer up to 33sec, than the buffering stops entirely until i playback the buffer until the "next-chunk-triggerpoint" with 720p resolution it buffers until 125sec and stops there

i now installed the addon h264ify to test i the problem stays if VP9 isn´t used, yes the problem stays with AVC1.

I'm not using the same pc and the same configuration anymore, as it's a long time since I've opened that topic, but I can say you that: it was not something site-related, in the sense that the configuration worked almost anywhere for a long time, and then stopped in all the video sites I use more often. It was clearly a configuration thing, as you said, could have been a change on mediasourceAPI or something like that.