Youtube halts everything in firefox

[Danishmint]

Hi again good people of this wonderful piece of software

I have upgrade my monitor to a 50" plasma - got i cheap and thought that viewing youtube in 1080p would be nice on an old full HD screen.
It is nice - but I keep getting some sluggishness with youtube.
First I thought it was the hardware.
AMD X2 7750 with 4GB ram and SSD + fanless 4650 GPU. Running Mint 17.3 - worked fine with 480 - but could not run 720 in youtube in full screen. I have a 100/100 fiber and under 10ms ping - so that should be enough.
Then I tried a Q6600 and I3-540 - also with 4GB ram and the same SSD + various combinations of GPU and versions of Mint 17.3-18.2.
These to last ones played 1080p fine - but still after maybe a video or two, maybe 5. Then it was like firefox got filled up and started halting completely. The sound continued, but all graphics got stuck, and the mouse click could not stop the video or get out of full screen.
In the background I had ressource manager open, to see CPU usage was suddenly way up high. After maybe 5-10 secones - my clicks started to respond and the video stops - like a huge delay in response.

Last try, was to go even higher with new hardware - because I like the snappiness when using my computer. So I found an I5-4460S and gave it a simple little Asus board and some 8GB or ram + the same SSD again - now with mint 18.2

Still the same. After some videos on youtube in 1080p(max of my screeen) then it sometimes goes crazy with my CPU and halts my browser and makes it extremely delayed and sluggish.
But when I boot - I can go directly to youtube with firefox and start any 1080p video - jump from any one place in time to another and play smoothly within 2 seconds. Problem arises after playing several videos or having maybe some in another tab.
Is there a buffer that can get filled up or something?

[sikejsudjek]

Is hardware acceleration enabled in firefox ? It used to be disabled by default on linux.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/ ... in-firefox

[Danishmint]

I do not have
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled

in my firefox - searched, but nothing.

Tried it on my neighbours PC - I3-3220 - 4GB ram - SSD. Same story.

I think it happened after an update of firefox - since I do not see a difference with 17.3, 18,1 or 18.2 version of Mint.

For flashgames - I simply use chromium - which works fine and very quick. In firefox most flashgames i very slow - no matter how good your hardware is.

[BG405]

It does seem to vary with different Firefox versions. I just had to restart Firefox for the same reason - it literally ground to a halt whilst browsing through my list of previously watched videos. Only actually watched a few this time. It's probably all the scripts getting in a knot.

A few months back I did a "stress test" and could watch dozens of videos (not all the way through, would have taken all day, just excerpts to test performance) and had no significant slowdowns. Not the case with this version, unfortunately. Still, Firefox add-on support goes EOL soon, so I'll be using a different browser from then.

[phd21]

Hi "Danishmint"

I just read your post and the good replies to it. Here are my thoughts on this as well.

It would help to know more about your system setup. If you run "inxi -Fxzd" from the console terminal prompt, highlight the results, copy and paste them back here, that should provide enough information.

If you are having some video issues, there are various options. Try closing Firefox and bringing it back up, try another browser, perhaps some browser add-ons are interfering which you can disable temporarily to check that, and there are some additional browser add-on that could help, like open video in MPV or VLC and let a locally installed multimedia player application (MPV or VLC) play the video rather than the browser.

Since these are YouTube videos, you can also download them using various applications (YouTube-dl & YouTube-dlg, 4K video downloader, clipgrab, etc...), and numerous browser addons to download YouTube and other website videos.


Hope this helps ...

[asciiman]

Noticed the same issues here, started noticing it approximately two weeks ago:

LM 18.x (seems to be the same on all versions, also on Xubuntu 16.04.2)
FireFox 54.0

YouTube video constantly streams and stalls for rebuffering.
Doesn't matter if the content is HD or otherwise.
Vimeo video as well.

At first, I thought it was a Flash Player issue, but YouTube is HTML5.

Chromium doesn't seem to have this issues in Mint or Xubuntu.

If you have Chromium, you might use it for streaming video until this issue gets resolved.

Also you might want to try the new Opera and Vivaldi browsers just to see how they compare.
I have found either of those to be considerably snappier than Firefox, although I tend to put more trust in Mozilla for doing secure transactions. YMMV.

[RubyStone]

I use Chrome and Opera. Doesn't seem to be an issue. Are you open to using a new browser?

These days it could be intentional that YouTube make their site specially for Chrome-based browsers (since they own YouTube now).

Just a thought.

[Danishmint]

Hi "Danishmint"

I just read your post and the good replies to it. Here are my thoughts on this as well.

It would help to know more about your system setup. If you run "inxi -Fxzd" from the console terminal prompt, highlight the results, copy and paste them back here, that should provide enough information.

If you are having some video issues, there are various options. Try closing Firefox and bringing it back up, try another browser, perhaps some browser add-ons are interfering which you can disable temporarily to check that, and there are some additional browser add-on that could help, like open video in MPV or VLC and let a locally installed multimedia player application (MPV or VLC) play the video rather than the browser.

Since these are YouTube videos, you can also download them using various applications (YouTube-dl & YouTube-dlg, 4K video downloader, clipgrab, etc...), and numerous browser addons to download YouTube and other website videos.


Hope this helps ...

Hi - and thank you for your reply.
I know that I can download them, but since I have alot bigger and better hardware now - It seems silly to begin downloading, when I used to be able to watch youtube, with no apparent problem.
Here are the copy/paste from terminal:

Code: Select all

System:    Host: tordenguden-desktop Kernel: 4.10.0-26-generic x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 5.4.0)
           Desktop: Cinnamon 3.4.4 (Gtk 3.18.9-1ubuntu3.3)
           Distro: Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya
Machine:   System: ASUS product: All Series
           Mobo: ASUSTeK model: H81M-K v: Rev X.0x
           Bios: American Megatrends v: 1104 date: 02/22/2016
CPU:       Quad core Intel Core i5-4460S (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
           flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 23147
           clock speeds: max: 3400 MHz 1: 1073 MHz 2: 958 MHz 3: 997 MHz
           4: 1035 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
           bus-ID: 00:02.0
           Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
           Resolution: 1280x720@50.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Haswell Desktop
           GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 11.2.0 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio:     Card-1 Intel 8 Series/C220 Series High Definition Audio Controller
           driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
           Card-2 M2Tech s.r.l. driver: USB Audio usb-ID: 003-002
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.10.0-26-generic
Network:   Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI port: e000 bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: enp3s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 30.0GB (52.6% used)
           ID-1: /dev/sda model: KINGSTON_SMS200S size: 30.0GB
           Optical: /dev/sr0 model: Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170S
           rev: 1.00 dev-links: cdrom,cdrw,dvd,dvdrw
           Features: speed: 48x multisession: yes
           audio: yes dvd: yes rw: cd-r,cd-rw,dvd-r,dvd-ram state: running
Partition: ID-1: / size: 24G used: 11G (49%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
           ID-2: swap-1 size: 4.28GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda5
RAID:      No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8C mobo: 27.8C
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: 0
Info:      Processes: 185 Uptime: 22 min Memory: 1111.1/3821.1MB
           Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 5.4.0
           Client: Shell (bash 4.3.481) inxi: 2.2.35

[Danishmint]

Here is a follow up.

Sometimes it runs good - sometimes i does not.
I tried giving i 8gigs of ram instead of 4 - but no luck.
It still puts one of my 4 cpu cores to 100% and locks everything up for up to 10 seconds. Sometimes I can have 10 videoes at the same time in different panes, but with no problems. Other times, just óne video on youtube and even writing on a different page, is suddenly laggy and slow for brief moment.
It helps a little on the cpu load in chromium - but videos has never been fluent and smooth for me with linux - never. Sadly that is only better in windows. Must be a driver issue!

Is there any kind of buffer with 1080p streaming or some way to uses more cores?

[Danishmint]

It seems like everything runs way better, since I've update to 18.3 and firefox fixed something in the updates. Dont know what.... but I do no longer experience anything irritating - things just run good

[BG405]

Good to know the update has solved your issues.