1503497 - Xfinity Live video is choppy in Firefox, but not Chrome

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

[e-mail] reports in bug 1488439 comment 30:

On my HP laptop (Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4Ghz with NVIDIA 9600M video card 8GB memory) I am getting a choppy video display when I play Xfinity live material.  The sound is OK but the video appears to skip several frames.  Firefox 64 b5 64bit. When using Chrome the video plays smoothly.  On my desktop (AMD FX8350 and AMD FX580 video card 24GB memory) Firefox Xfinity video plays smoothly.  So it appears Firefox has a problem playing Xfinity video on low end computers while Chrome can do it.

Comment 1

[Paul Goldberg]

This video was recorded with Firefox 65b8.  It shows for about the first 45 seconds of viewing live TV halts and stoppages.  After that I get some stuttering.  This is from my laptop.
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNjGNaJAKu3xGrNUXbMCWF0tR9F-MXwqzI-ghY8DcaVQD4Bt3qqXlw8I20MmrFlLg?key=aE1UM2NzQXlieDdERHpqY29TLWMtaDBEN21fNzNn

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

(In reply to Paul Goldberg from comment #1)
> This video was recorded with Firefox 65b8.  It shows for about the first 45
> seconds of viewing live TV halts and stoppages.  After that I get some
> stuttering.

Thanks, Paul. The video demonstrating the problem is a big help.

Just to be sure, is Xfinity live TV using Flash or HTML5 video? Right-clicking on the video is an easy way to check. Which Flash version is installed on your computer?

Comment 3

[Paul Goldberg]

Right clicking on the video does not show flash or html5 but Flash is required to load the Xfinity TV Stream page.  I am running Flash version 32.0.0.101.

Comment 4

[Paul Goldberg]

On my desktop (AMD 8350 and AMD RX 580 Video card and 24GB of RAM)I get some freezing and stuttering for about 10 seconds and then I get a smooth video stream.  If I switch to another tab and then switch back to the Xfinity stream live TV tab I again will get freezing and stuttering for about 10 seconds and then a normal video stream.

Comment 5

[Paul Goldberg]

On my HP laptop the CPU use while playing Xfinity Stream (which uses Flash player) the CPU use stays at 100% for both cores. I assume this is the reason for the stuttering. In Chrome the CPU use averages about 85% (with a few peaks to 100% and sometimes it goes as low as 70%). I assume the 100% CPU usages in Firefox is what is causing the stuttering (Firefox 65 beta 12).

Comment 6

[Paul Goldberg]

In Firefox 68 and 69 beta with the latest Flash player the playback on my laptop is now acceptable.

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

(In reply to Paul Goldberg from comment #6)

In Firefox 68 and 69 beta with the latest Flash player the playback on my laptop is now acceptable.

Hi Paul, thanks for testing. I don't know if this was a fix in Firefox or the Flash Player, but I'll close this bug as now fixed. :)