902459 - High-resolution videos fade in and out while playing

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Toolbar, defect)

Description

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Experienced on a Galaxy Tab 10.1; have been seeing the issue since H.264 support was added to FX.

When you "Open link in new tab" on an Mp4, you get a nice player for the video. Unfortunately, high resolution videos will fade to the background color (gray) and fade back in seemingly randomly. Sometimes it will hesitate mid-fade and reverse. This only affects the video; audio continues to play just fine.

It seems that this happens when the device isn't able to keep up with the video and happens when the player would otherwise start dropping frames. Fading out, however, makes the video completely unwatchable.

This is not a hardware issue, I should think, since copying the URL and playing in Chrome works just fine.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Any difference against Nightly? Which version of Android?

Comment 2

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Android 4.0.4.

I'll test Nightly later tonight and report back.

Comment 3

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Just managed to get time to test on Nightly. The problem is just as bad, if not worse. In Nightly, the videos don't fade in and out quite as smoothly (they kind of cut to gray), meaning the video is actually visible for less time overall than in stable.

Towards the end of longer videos, though, it seems like they don't "fade" quite as much, though I don't have any real numbers to back that up and it could just be the case that I had fewer tabs open or something like that.

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

This is going to depend on the stagefright decoder.It sounds like the video is exceeding capability of stagefright to decode it. Can Chrome decode the video? I filed a few bugs on similar issues linked off https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=867846&hide_resolved=1

Comment 5

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Chrome plays the videos well enough to be watchable, but they're quite choppy.

Comment 6

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

We improved this for modern Android. For devices 4.1 and older we don't have a way forward. A combination of lack of Android API support and what is now low end hardware is going to have a tough time decoding hd streams.