1477494 - 1080p60 Video/Livestream completely Freeze

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)

Description

[joefarmer]

Attachment: about support.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Build ID: 20180721100146

Steps to reproduce:

My system:
I have a Laptop Dell Studio 1537, Windows 7 64bit, 4GB Ram, Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450, Resolution 1280x800

Windows and all Drivers are up-to-date!

about:support.txt as attachment

Latest Firefox 61.0.1 (64-bit) or Nightly 63.0a1 (2018-07-21) (64-bit)

Hardware accel is ON

With the open source browser Chromium No sync • No WebRTC • No Widevine • 67.0.3396.99 (550428) • Tuesday, 26 Jun 2018 64bit
i have no problems at all (there with enabled hardware accelaration).

The video/livestream completely freezes, i can only hear the sound though.

Examples:

1.
Livestream: https://www.twitch.tv/pava
Quality: 1080p60 
The video completely freezes, i can only hear the sound though.

Here is the profile for that, tell me if it worked: https://perfht.ml/2LB7vKq


2.
Another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUsM8dkXnE
The same problem when watching in Quality: 1080p60 
the video completely freezes, i can only hear the sound though.

Here is the profile for that: https://perfht.ml/2Lx3u9P


Chromium plays everything in fullscreen without problem, no matter which quality: 1080p60, 720p60, 720p, etc.

Comment 1

[joefarmer]

Regarding example 2.

Chromium even plays it with a quality of:  1440p60  or  2160p60

Comment 2

[Alex Chronopoulos [:achronop]]

Bryce, any idea what is going on here?

Comment 3

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Chromium have the driver blacklisted for video decode due to it being problematic, so Chromium will be doing software decodes here. In both cases I believe we'll be getting h264, and so will be using the platform impl (Windows). Chrome will be using libavcodec (IIRC) to decode which is performant but we can't ship due to patent encumbrance. In my historic testing, the libavcodec software decoding is more performant than what we get from Windows. In this case hardware decoding may not be particularly fast either and may also have other issues (see bug 1477495 where the reporters proposed solution disables hardware decoding).

For the twitch case:
- There's a period around 12 seconds where we're doing a lot of decoder recreation which looks fishy.

For youtube:
- Because of `media.benchmark.vp9.fps: 27` we'll not use vp9 here, and will get served h264. 
- No playback side bottlenecks are jumping out at me in initial look.
- There's a lot of time spent running JS and making graphics calls (draws, texture handling). Not certain if those are causing the issue, could warrant more of a look?

Since we're comparing hardware decode for us to non-hardware decode on chrome due to blacklisting, I wonder if the issue is reduced at all be disabling hardware decoding. :joefarmer, do you see the issue present if you disable hardware acceleration?

Comment 4

[joefarmer]

Disbaling it has a very negative impact.

If i disable hardware accel, i can't even watch 720p properly, it stutters and has mini freezes like hell, let alone videos with higher quality/resolution.

The CPU usage is then at 100%

Comment 5

[joefarmer]

If i disable hardware accel in Chromium, i can watch 720p, but it is far from smooth as with hardware accel ON.
Everything above it (1080p60 , 1440p60  or  2160p60 ) the video plays as in "slow motion" and isn't sync with the audio anymore.

Comment 6

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

If you set the `media.hardware-video-decoding.failed` pref to true, do you still see complete freezes?

Comment 7

[joefarmer]

Everything higher than 720p the video completely freezes, i can only hear the sound though.

Comment 8

[joefarmer]

Guys, i have made a final decision:

Because Firefox uses over time too much RAM and doesn't free it and because of the very bad hardware support, extreme bad audio/video/media playback support, i have deinstalled Firefox forever.

I will stay with Chromium that doen't have these problems at all.

I won't post here anymore, nevertheless i wish you all the best.