Video stuttering on Firefox

stalebrim

Posting this on off-topic, since I use Fedora, not Solus. When I press play the video is choppy for a few seconds before it starts playing smoothly. This happens on various sites and their players but not on YouTube, I think. Have you encountered this and are there e.g. some about:config parameters I should try?

brent

this is hilarious because it happens to me on youtube and not "on various sites and their players." and it happened on both freshly installed operating systems. completely went away on Mate when I installed Nvidia drivers and mostly went away on BL wnen I also switched to nvidia.
I thought I know about:config inside out but I don't know visual tweaks. hardware acc. enabled in settings I take it.

***this is covered in the Firefox Survival mega-thread and also this choppiness on FF occurred very recently in a thread. see if I can find it.

stalebrim

brent The "ambient mode" in YouTube is a resource hog. Turning that off helps a lot.

But yeah, I haven't seen YouTube to be choppy on my system, it's pretty much everything else and happens randomly.

brent

stalebrim yeah I transposed that for sure sorry. general choppiness for everything but YT is an anomaly; I thought it was just me that got the weird ones.
conversely: what is youtube doing that no one else is doing to ensure playback perfection?

stalebrim

brent As far as I know Fedora is pretty much the only distro to ship Firefox with hardware acceleration enabled out of the box, so I guess it's something related to it. No artifacting and CPU/GPU usage is not maxed when the playback starts to choke. It's only the image, not sound.

As to why YouTube works, I don't know. Maybe I haven't been attentive enough to notice the stutter there. I think I read YouTube uses multiple codecs, so maybe some codecs are still software accelerated.

brent

stalebrim yt is all html5 but so is everyone else. plus they have the best player in the universe quite likely.
Bunsen (Deb 11) ships with the beast called FirefoxESR (supposed to be a corporate/education inst. juggernaut of a firefox I guess) and dig this:

the hardware acceleration subset is gone. in the link "learn more" it goes to a graphic of the hardware acceleration checkmark box existing under this...so minor snafu there..for me I supposed this is a "trust us" situation.

stalebrim

brent Yeah, it's sort of stabler* version of Firefox.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cycle

*) not stapler

Axios

Try increasing buffers in firefox in about:config
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity
I see its set to auto now try manual set alittle higher

Solarmass

IIRC Fedora 37 removed some proprietary codecs (? x264), you have to install them manually from another repo. Try Firefox on Wayland and Xorg session. Does Vivaldi (or other 'chromiums') work fine?

EDIT: try Firefox flatpak!

stalebrim

Solarmass True. I have RPMFusion set up so it shouldn't be missing codecs. I think I should peek at the logs at first.

Solmann

Try the 'Librewolf browser', it's supposedly more private and safer that Firefox.
It's a fork of Firefox.

stalebrim

Solmann I care about video playback, not privacy or safety

Solmann

stalebrim

All I can say is that videos at youtube.com play perfectly.
What video are you referring to?

stalebrim

An update: Tried to look at logs, nothing erroring or failing. VA-API clearly works.