Firefox video playback on Youtube consistently generates "An error has occurred" when using the playback position slider to navigate within the video.
Categories
(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: motley.crue.fan, Unassigned)
Details
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(1 file)
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550.49 KB,
image/png
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Details |
firefox_error_09042025.png
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0
Steps to reproduce:
- Open Youtube.com
- Start playback of a video. So far as I can tell, the specific video choice doesn't matter, or matters very little
- Grab the playback slider and advance it to a position farther along in the video. Bigger jumps seem more likely to cause the problem
- The spinner will spin for a few seconds and (usually) an "An error has occurred. Please try again later" message is generated.
- At this point the only way to resume playback is a forced reload of the page
Actual results:
An error was generated and playback stopped.
Expected results:
Playback should seamlessly hop to the newly selected location and continue there with no error being generated.
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Reporter | |
Comment 1•10 months ago
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Also, what appears to be the same error happens frequently if one switches to a different tab while YT playback is ongoing, when you switch back to the YT tab.
This is happening on Firefox 142.0.1 on PopOS using KDE. I've already tried disabling extensions and that did not alleviate the problem. This seems to have started around two weeks or so ago.
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Comment 2•10 months ago
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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.
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Comment 3•9 months ago
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The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jimm, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.
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Comment 4•9 months ago
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I wonder if you are getting openh264 vs what's available on the platform through ffmpeg? Openh264 has issues with seeking, but generally shouldn't be in use. On linux though that might not be the case.
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Comment 5•8 months ago
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(In reply to Jim Mathies [:jimm] from comment #4)
I wonder if you are getting openh264 vs what's available on the platform through ffmpeg? Openh264 has issues with seeking, but generally shouldn't be in use. On linux though that might not be the case.
Not sure. This just started completely out of the blue on a Linux powered laptop that I've been using for probably close to 3 years now.
FWIW, since opening this bug I've upgraded to Firefox 144.0 (64-bit) and while the problem may be a little bit less common, it still happens. And there are other manifestations of what I believe to be the same underlying issue that I hadn't noticed earlier. For example, in addition to seeking with the slider, or tabbing away and back (from a playing video) I've also noticed that if I pause playback and then switch to another tab (or virtual desktop) and then come back later and try to resume playback, quite often I'll get that same "an error has occurred" deal. Also, if one copies a Youtube video link with the timestamp (?t=347s, for example) and pastes that into the url bar or just adds that to the end of a Youtube url and hits ENTER in the url bar, it will frequently generate the same error.
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Comment 6•8 months ago
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Looking at the timing (two weeks before 4th sept > 21 aug) and the release of ffmpeg 8.0 (22aug), could there be a relation?
Seen several reports (also on Zen) of Linux users having video issues after their distro's packages updated ffmpeg. For some the update from 7.1 to 8 even uninstalled ffmpeg4.4 which they had installed as a dependency for some other apps.
For many the fix was installing a lower, Firefox supported, version of ffmpeg next to v8. e.g. ffmpeg4.4
Could be worth a try.
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Comment 7•8 months ago
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(In reply to [:Propheticus] from comment #6)
For many the fix was installing a lower, Firefox supported, version of ffmpeg next to v8. e.g. ffmpeg4.4
Could be worth a try.
Interesting. I'll look into that and see what happens. Thanks for the tip!
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Comment 8•2 months ago
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FWIW, this just keeps getting worse. It's not just the video navigation, with the slider, it's pretty much anything now that causes the error in question.
Start playing a video and make the mistake of tabbing away and then tabbing back to that tab? "An error has occurred".
Start playing a video, and pause it for any reason, then come back and try to unpause it? "An error has occurred".
Start playing a video and try to skip forward or back within the video using the playback slider? "An error has occurred".
Start playing a video and let it play some random amount of time? "An error has occurred".
Try to start playing certain random videos? "An error has occurred".
Firefox, for me, is now essentially unusable for Youtube. Which makes it more or less unusable in general. :-(
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Comment 9•2 months ago
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And just to add another datapoint... these video playback problems aren't entirely unique to Youtube, but YT does seem to be the primary culprit by far. OTOH, I experience no issues with video playback on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max, Hulu, Disney+. The other sites where I've seen issues are random newspaper websites with embedded videos of various sorts, and things of that ilk.
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