1163300 - [video perf] Poor YouTube 4K/60fps video performance

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect)

Description

[...]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150508030204

Steps to reproduce:

4K and 60FPS YouTube videos seem unoptimised and struggle to play on Firefox compared with IE 11 which play these videos at ease with extremely low CPU and GPU usage.

This is the performance range I generally see with 4K YouTube videos (HD 4600). Plays even worse with DXVA off.

Firefox (e10s, HWA on):
CPU: ~40%, GPU: ~50%

IE 11:
CPU: <10%, GPU: <5%


Actual results:

4k and 60fps YouTube video performance should be parity with IE 11.

Comment 1

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to ... from comment #0)
> Plays even worse with DXVA off.

That's expected. After all, DXVA is there to take load off the CPU.

> Firefox (e10s, HWA on):
> CPU: ~40%, GPU: ~50%

Just as a checkpoint, is this the same when e10s is disabled?

Comment 2

[...]

I've run the same 4K video with e10s both enabled and disabled on a clean profile and get very similar CPU and GPU results. 

Also GPU usage shoots up to ~75% from ~50% when the 4K YouTube video is in full screen while CPU remains at ~35% with both e10s enabled and disabled. IE 11 CPU and GPU remains constant between windowed and full screen mode.

I also tried playing the videos in IE 11 with HWA off. CPU: ~70%, GPU: 0%

Chrome also plays the videos poorly with huge spikes in CPU and GPU usage.

Only IE 11 with HWA plays 4K/60fps videos seamlessly. Firefox does play the videos but it does so with much more stress and strain than necessary.

Using the latest Intel HD Graphics driver (10.18.14.4170).

Comment 3

[Leman Bennett [Omega]]

Google has a similar issue with Chrome and has decided to fix it:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/BWmNKZN3Q5R

Comment 4

[...]

Chrome hasn't fixed it.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451954

Looks like Microsoft has a comparative advantage when it comes to hardware decoding videos properly and consequently using less battery life whilst increasing performance.

This issue is actually present in all video qualities, but it's more noticeable on 4k/60fps videos.

Comment 5

[boehme_r]

Same here. HD1080 Video (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3jNtSckFvk) plays fine in Chrome 49

In Firefox 45.0.1 I only see about 5 frames/second with html5 player, audio is ok.

This is pretty bad.

CPU Core i 2700K
GPU AMD Radeon 280X
Display 4K / 60 Hz.

With https://www.mrfdev.com/youtube-flash-player its also working fine in FF. (Of course we all wanna leave Flash behind.)

Comment 6

[Jean-Yves Avenard [:jya]]

(In reply to boehme_r from comment #5)
> Same here. HD1080 Video (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3jNtSckFvk)
> plays fine in Chrome 49

YouTube serves webm/vp9 when using Chrome, we get mp4/h264 which is hardware accelerated but with some AMD 4K performance is just subpar with such content.

You can set media.mediasource.webm.enabled to true in about:support

and you'll be using VP9 just like chrome.

Comment 7

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

Closing for lack of follow-up.