Choppy video in Firefox

[Quattro Pete]

Scanning the web, it seems to be a fairly common issue. The video playback in FF appears choppy - as if frames were being dropped. At the same time, the CPU is working overtime. The same content plays just fine in IE - smooth as should be.

The typical recommendations are to disable/enable HW acceleration in FF as well as in Flash Player. Tried it all - makes no difference.

I have the latest drivers for my video card, latest flash player, latest FF.

So, what else can it be? Should I try dropping to an older version of Flash Player?

Thanks!

 

[Olas]

I have the opposite issue with my laptop, FF is quick and smooth every time but IE runs slower than a man with no legs! so sketchy I uninstalled IE and only use FF!

 

[gofast182]

For me it's OK 60-70% of the time on my Mac but there are instances where I have to use Safari. I looked into it a while back and apparently people have been complaining to Mozilla about this for years but they have yet to fix the issue, which is disappointing.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Should I try dropping to an older version of Flash Player?

Just tried an older version of Flash Player (11.7). Still same problem.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: gofast182
I looked into it a while back and apparently people have been complaining to Mozilla about this for years but they have yet to fix the issue, which is disappointing.

It's got to be some combination of Firefox, your video card, and the drivers/plug-ins though. The playback in FF is smooth on my other computer. Both running Win7.

 

[Drew99GT]

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/26/fix-choppy-video-playback-youtube/

For me, increasing the time Firefox uses to store session information helped. What also helped is to delete any and all site storage in Flash player and then set Flash to not store ANY information. You can change it in the control panel and also here:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

And here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

Go through the global storage and local storage on both of those, delete everything, change maximum storage to 0 and tell flash not to store anything.

That helped a bit for me, but something has been up with Youtube for a year or so and many people have problems. I know for a fact ISPs throttle YouTube traffic and some nights with my Comcast connection, it won't even work unless I go through a proxy.

Hope that helps!

 

[Quattro Pete]

Thanks. Unfortunately, that did not help either.

It's not a bandwidth issue either - it happens with local content, too. The best I can describe it is as if the video was playing at 15 fps instead of 25 that it should, causing lack of smooth transition from one frame to the next. At the same time, CPU utilization is pretty high, but not at 100%. It's as if firefox was struggling to render the video fast enough and was dropping some frames as a result.

Same content plays smoothly through IE, and there the CPU utilization is very low.

 

[Drew99GT]

You sure it's not on the HTML5 player on Youtube??? Sometimes for no reason my laptop will end up using the HTML5 player on Youtube and it runs like a sick dog.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: Drew99GT
You sure it's not on the HTML5 player on Youtube???

It's not really Youtube related. Youtube actually works fine for me. It's the local streaming through Plex where I mostly experience this. But again, only with Firefox, and only on this one machine. I've got another machine with Firefox, and there it's all smooth sailing.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Figured it out finally. It turns out I had to turn "Use Hardware Acceleration" in Firefox back on.

Now of course this causes its own known problem with fonts getting smudged as you scroll up and down on most web pages. This is why I had it switched off in the past. However, I was able to find a workaround for this. I had to add a parameter to about:config to fix it, as outlined in post #414 in this thread:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=812695#c414

Now it's all good.

 

[Tempest]

I've been having a lot of flash player crashes in FF lately, both at home and at work.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

If you're on Windows, check CPU utilization using FF w/ & w/o Flash, then do the same procedures in Chrome. If FF is showing substantially higher CPU usage for the same tasks, ditch it in favor of Chrome, Maxthon browser, etc. I've noticed bad performance even on a new i7 computer with FF.

 

[mcrn]

Interesting stuff....tried a few things suggested here and will see what happens....sometimes I have a problem with videos being choppy as well....mostly you tube.....vimeo seems great almost all the time.

 

[Drew99GT]

Another thing you can try is disable protected mode in flash and also the Firefox plug in container.

http://techdows.com/2012/06/disable-flash-players-protected-mode-for-firefox.html

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/933481#answer-359633