1949608 - Video playback stops working require restart of browser.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Thomas Åhlén]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:135.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/135.0

Steps to reproduce:

I can't reproduce it at will. But the error happens 10+ times a day

Often happens when video is playing in a background tab and I switch back to it. Video shows for a few seconds than just stops playing and starts buffering.

Actual results:

Video players just show a buffering symbol but never starts playing.

I'm guessing it has to do something with playing media in a background tab and switching between tabs that breaks something.

This started when I upgraded to Firefox 131 and has not changed since then. I was hoping it this would be fixed and other had same problem as me.

Expected results:

When the error has occurred I can't play videos. It just stand at buffering never starting the playback. Only solution is to restart browser.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Mayank Bansal]

Thanks for reporting! To help diagnose this issue better, please can you:

1. Type "about:support" in Firefox and copy-paste its contents here
2. Does this reproduce in a clean profile or Troubleshoot Mode?
3. Capture a log when the issue occurs:

• In Firefox, ideally freshly started with no other tabs, go to about:logging in a new tab
• Select the Media preset
• Enable "stack traces for log messages"
• Click on "Set Log Modules"
• Click Start Logging
• Reproduce the bug
• Back on about:logging, click Stop Logging
• In the new tab that appears with the Firefox Profiler web application, in the top right click the button to upload the profile
• Make sure hidden threads are included and upload, then share the link here or send privately to a Mozilla developer
  -See https://paul.cx/public/about-logging-presentation.webm for a video walk-through

Comment 3

[Thomas Åhlén]

Since I can't reproduce the event when the media playback actually breaks or stop working. I waited until it eventually happened.
To make the profiler somewhat clean I opened a second window and closed my window with multiple tabs.
Then I just tried to play a video on Reddit. The video will never start playing just showing buffering symbol.

Maybe you can figure out why the playback doesn't work and maybe understand what makes it break in the first place.

https://share.firefox.dev/43gyMMP

Comment 4

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Relevant markers in the profile are:

8.888
LogMessages — (PlatformDecoderModule) Sandbox GPU decoder supports requested type video/avc

8.891
LogMessages — (PlatformDecoderModule) RemoteMediaDataDecoder[1a1701e91a0] ::RemoteMediaDataDecoder: 1a1701e91a0 is created

IPCOut — PRemoteDecoder::Msg_Init — sent to MediaSupervisor #26 (Thread ID: 3800)

but "RemoteDecoderChild has been initialized" is not logged, indicating that a decoder initialization response is not received from the GPU process.

The GPU process has no recordings in the profile. I don't know why that is.
I wonder whether we have a mechanism to recover if the GPU process becomes unresponsive?

Comment 5

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Thomas, do you have any recent crashes in your about:crashes page?

Comment 6

[Thomas Åhlén]

Not really. I have one crash in February.

I still have to restart firefox a lot everyday since media players stop working. I still have not be able to reproduce when it happens at will.

Since this seem to be an GPU initialization issue I just decided to upgrade to the latest Nvidia driver. Will see if there is any change.

Comment 7

[Thomas Åhlén]

Newest driver didn't change anything.

But since you said the problem was with the GPU process I can now fix the problem without restarting the web browser by going into Task Manager and kill the GPU process. The video will start playing right away when when the new GPU process is created.

Comment 8

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Can you hook us up with your about:support information? Thanks.

Comment 9

[Thomas Åhlén]

If I run Firefox in Troubleshoot Mode I don't have any problems.

I uninstalled all addons except uBlock Origin. I still get the occasional playback problem but much less so I can live with killing the GPU process in Taskmanager when it happens. You can close this Bug report.