2070150 - Youtube videos get errors on play or on forward or on go back time

Status: UNCONFIRMED

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

Description

[ismaelm.neto14]

Attachment: screenshot.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:155.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/155.0

Steps to reproduce:

On playing a video, forwarding or going back the video get an error (player error). I use ad blocker, deactivating does not fix. Other browsers work normally.

Actual results:

Not every video get the error

Expected results:

The video should just be displayed.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

[media-triaging-bot]

Thanks for the report.

Analysis

There isn't enough detail yet to tell which failure this is. "An error on play, or when moving the time forward or back, on some videos but not others" on Linux currently matches two separate open reports, and it also matches several unrelated causes:

• Bug 2069633 — on Linux with the system ffmpeg, media segments that arrive late after a seek can push the decoder into a terminal MEDIA_ERR_DECODE, after which only a page reload recovers playback. That report comes with a self-contained testcase.
• Bug 1987042 — YouTube on Linux showing "An error has occurred. Please try again later" when dragging the position slider, when resuming, and after a tab switch.

The screenshot you attached reads "Ocorreu um erro. Tente novamente mais tarde. (ID de reprodução: Rd45CPIzwixwxjw7)", at 4:00 of a 5:54 video. That is YouTube's own generic player error rather than anything Firefox produced, and it is word for word the message in bug 1987042. It is worth being explicit that this does not settle the cause: YouTube shows that same text whenever its player gives up, whatever the reason underneath, so it shortens the shortlist without deciding it.

A media-playback log is what separates these from each other and from a third cause, since it records the decoder that was selected and the exact error it returned.

Next Steps

1. Please capture a profile: open about:logging, on the Logging presets tab choose the "Media playback" preset, and under Logging output select "Logging to the Firefox Profiler". Click Start Logging, reload the video page and reproduce the error, then click Stop Logging. The captured profile opens in the Firefox Profiler. Click Upload Local Profile (the share button) and paste the resulting share URL here. The instruction video walks through it. If you have privacy concerns about the profile or the media content, email it to [e-mail] instead.

2. The testcase on bug 2069633 (attachment 9637085 [details]) plays by itself and needs no interaction. Could you open it and report whether the video ends up in an error state after a few seconds? That single answer would tie these two reports together, or rule the connection out.

3. Please attach about:support (open it, click Copy text to clipboard, paste into a text file and attach the file). It carries the distribution, GPU and driver, the codec support table, and any non-default media preferences.

4. Your ffmpeg version and how it was installed. In a terminal, ffmpeg -version (or your package manager's version for libavcodec) is enough. This matters because a related report links this class of failure to the ffmpeg 8.0 rollout in distribution packages, and several people there recovered by installing an older ffmpeg alongside it. Knowing the major version tells us whether that applies to you.

5. A link to one video that fails fairly reliably, plus the Codecs line from YouTube's right-click → Stats for nerds on that video at the moment it fails.

6. When the error appears, does playback recover if you seek back and press play again, or does the page have to be reloaded? And if you start Firefox from a terminal, please paste any lines it prints at that moment (for example Decode error: ...).

Comment 3

[[:Propheticus]]

Possibly related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2065262