YouTube videos freezing video while audio plays normally (or just freezing completely)

[Top Gun]

Over the past few weeks certain YouTube videos have regularly started hanging up during playback in very specific ways. The most common version I've seen has the video freeze up, but the audio keeps playing properly. Clicking several seconds after the freeze-up gets the video playing again, but then it usually freezes up again within a minute or two. The most recent case I've seen was while watching this video. Less commonly, instead of just the video freezing, the entire video will get hit with the Spinning Wheel of Infinite Buffering and will sit there forever unless manually advanced (which again usually repeats itself soon after). The frustrating part is that I haven't been able to find any common behavior. I've seen it happen on videos that are a few minutes long, and others that are over 2 hours long. I thought it might be triggered by leaving a video paused for a while, since that seems to bring the browser's performance to its knees, but it happens after a fresh restart too. (Earlier today I made it through over 2 hours of a 5-hour video without it happening even once, including some lengthy pauses, so it's probably not that.) I've tried clearing the entire browser cache, and no dice. My overall connection isn't experiencing any noticeable hiccups at the time, and loading the same videos in Edge sees them play back flawlessly. I'm not running any sort of ad-blocker, script blocking, or anything of the sort.

Doing a quick search brings up a number of people complaining about the same issue in Firefox over the past few months. (There are also similar complaints from people using built-in smart TV apps or Fire sticks, so maybe it's on YouTube's end.) I know it's extraordinary difficult to maintain support for anything that Google puts out, but I was curious if anyone else was experiencing this. I'd be happy to offer any additional information that might help.

[Moonchild]

Could you please include the troubleshooting information for your system?

Help -> Troubleshooting information in the application menu, click "copy text to clipboard" and paste it in your reply.

[Top Gun]

Sure:

Code: Select all

Application Basics
------------------

Name: Pale Moon
Version: 33.3.1 (64-bit)
Build ID: 20240905081650
Update Channel: release
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.7 Firefox/102.0 PaleMoon/33.3.1
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[Moonchild]

Not seeing anything out of the ordinary. I've confirmed that particular video has odd behaviour a few minutes in, but it seems to rather be a server communication issue than a browser issue.

[UCyborg]

Also seeing the same behavior. It's pretty random, it will happen in specific spot(s) in the video, which you can repeat by returning to it via slider. But after refreshing the page, the spot will change.

Is the following bug in Firefox relevant to UXP?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510

I didn't do much testing, but so far didn't see the issue forcing H.264 codec.

[Moonchild]

From that bug:

This is a relatively new issue (it's been around for a few months), but it affects years-old versions of the browser, so it's an issue that was introduced by youtube. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to affect, Chromium, or at the very least it's not as frequent.

Behavior seems to line up; Blink doesn't seem to have these issues, indeed.
I'll see if porting that bug solves it for us.

[Moonchild]

Porting seems to solve the issue.
Commit 0aeac02b89

[Top Gun]

Awesome, thank you so much for taking a look at this!

[Daikun]

Porting seems to solve the issue.
Commit 0aeac02b89

EDIT: I guess I spoke too soon. The patch is not working.

[ioSelect]

Also experiencing this. Noticed a 'Security Error', happens every second or so while watching a video; posting in case it might be useful:

Code: Select all

Security Error: Content at https://www.youtube.com/@tested?themeRefresh=1 may not load data from https://rr5---sn-j5caxoxu-hh0l.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1727349445&ei=Ze70ZtW1Gbu1kucPmqzhmQw&ip=68.196.253.4&id=o-AO1hqZgW_QzVZ0kNq1_Cg-viUkqVFwG8TozzU4RAKbIC&source=youtube&requiressl=yes&xpc=EgVo2aDSNQ%3D%3D&mh=6e&mm=31%2C29&mn=sn-j5caxoxu-hh0l%2Csn-ab5l6nr6&ms=au%2Crdu&mv=m&mvi=5&pl=22&initcwndbps=1602500&spc=54MbxT4wW2J-NLJBiyqBdA1ZsMr2CPr_IRY5NIls2QEQga1hjiXxrVG0dnPP&svpuc=1&ns=IOW6kOlU44JAMZQUUUZQ_NgQ&sabr=1&rqh=1&mt=1727327336&fvip=2&keepalive=yes&fexp=51299152&c=WEB&n=k9wXw2mX9XbWzQ&sparams=expire%2Cei%2Cip%2Cid%2Csource%2Crequiressl%2Cxpc%2Cspc%2Csvpuc%2Cns%2Csabr%2Crqh&sig=AJfQdSswRAIgP5FObo2-Yr2-63FxL1McEGQHcA-e12WrxmwjNjtPx6kCIGjIJlFYiT24IPRLBafeuguBBiIyL3Oa4Unf14fTrV4c&lsparams=mh%2Cmm%2Cmn%2Cms%2Cmv%2Cmvi%2Cpl%2Cinitcwndbps&lsig=ABPmVW0wRgIhAKCvk0Qdu2AMQy1kVehr5RqilloQulIQ6LqmzZS5BoalAiEA6F2gN_zT0yEyt7uJcFgpxGBCCwlxJKXOfUc84YXI7wE%3D&cpn=XzEB5zA_bC3Xmwdi&cver=2.20240925.01.00&rn=61.

[Moonchild]

The patch is not working.

it isn't?...
I tested with the patch and I was unable to coerce the video to choke. I tried a good 15 minutes.

[Shadow]

Not sure if this is relevant too. Saw it linked while nosing around.

"Youtube Live video endless buffering"
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1900191

[Shadow]

A case of they're disregarding the spec because they rule the roost so whatever?

First, we found some weird parts for Youtube's VP9 stream, such as Invalid ID element size (the maximum should be 4 per spec), incorrect timestamp (many discontinuity, overlapped frames, duplicated frames). But I still need to investigate if those behaviors are allowed by the spec.

This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it's not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples' timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT's bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping.

That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample's start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec.

[Daikun]

it isn't?...
I tested with the patch and I was unable to coerce the video to choke. I tried a good 15 minutes.

So, in order to apply a patch, I just drag it into the Pale Moon folder, right? Or do I do something else?
It's my first time applying a patch to a browser and I wanna make sure if I did it right.
If that is indeed the intended method, then the patch did not work for me.

[Moonchild]

You can't patch a compiled program that way
I linked to the commit for reference, but to apply that patch you would have to get the source code, apply the patch to the source code, and then build the browser. While not super difficult it's certainly not trivial unless you are already set up to build Pale Moon from source.

[Daikun]

Ah, that makes sense.
Would it be possible to integrate this tweaked source code into the next update of PM?

[UCyborg]

It's how it naturally goes, patches are applied to the source and they end up in the next release of PM.

[BenFenner]

I've been sitting on this issue for weeks as well. I figured it was a problem with the legacy YouTube interface we're served as PM users. I've relegated YouTube to another browser at this point. I searched and this has happened years ago, over, and over again throughout the years to all YouTube users across all browsers. YouTube fixes it on their end, and life moves on. Except now they have no reason to fix their legacy interface. I just assumed we were boned, and didn't make a thread. But I am experiencing this on basically every video I watch these days, in multiple spots per video. If I can be of any help (testing, troubleshooting, better error reporting, etc.), let me know.

It would be great if there is a fix for this on the PM side, as it's looking like might be the case.

[Moonchild]

I've seen more issues pop up with YouTube lately, including video corruption at chunk boundaries, and that even happens in Edge (which as you know is Blink-based), so it seems that YT is really causing a mess at the moment.
A workaround would be (if I understood correctly) to disable WebM playback and force h.264/MP4 as a result (preferences -> content -> tab "Media" -> untick the "WebM" checkbox) until the fix is in.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

I've seen more issues pop up with YouTube lately, including video corruption at chunk boundaries, and that even happens in Edge (which as you know is Blink-based), so it seems that YT is really causing a mess at the moment.
A workaround would be (if I understood correctly) to disable WebM playback and force h.264/MP4 as a result (preferences -> content -> tab "Media" -> untick the "WebM" checkbox) until the fix is in.

This is the first time someone brought it up, which half-answers my "how come YT stores MP4 and WEBM copies instead of a single file in one format". Could YT one day decide to only store and serve 1 format for every video?