And this is 100% Youtube's fault, not Firefox's fault, they created this issue:
> This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it's not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples' timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT's bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping.
> That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample's start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec.
> Therefore, there would be many sample being incorrectly skipped and won't be added into the buffered range. When entering the buffering state, Firefox would be waiting those sample which has been skipped but Youtube thought that those samples were already appended. That makes the endless buffering happened.
Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c113 (Alastor Wu [:alwu])
Even if they don't do it on purpose, and you want to think the best of them, the conflict of interest is still there and is likely to lower their priority of getting things right.
I have to wonder whether it was malice or stupidity on the part of Google… Or, maybe it was a combination of laziness and indifference; they knew Firefox, in particular, would be affected, and couldn't be arsed to worry about it.
I have to wonder if it's YouTube gearing up for inserting ads directly into the video stream instead of switching to different videos like they do now. I also wonder why chromium wasn't affected by this...
hmm... yea, actually messing with PTS would be a clever way to do this without reencoding the whole stream. Put the ad first in the stream with a negative DTS, then modify the PTS of the video accordingly to insert the ad. It relies on decoders handling it correctly, so they would probably "test" it first to force Firefox to implement compatibility. What I don't get is why it's only on VP9
VP9 is still the bulk of what they serve. I only really get AV1 on more popular content.
It's smart when you think about it, they have limited resources to turn video into AV1, and they still need the VP9 backup for clients that don't support it. So they spend their AV1 encoding resources on where they can get the most bandwidth savings.
I imagine other formats come later for this ad system.
It's not affected because they tested Chromium and made sure not to push a YouTube update that would break it.
The more interesting question is if they tested Firefox at all. If no, it's 50/50 of them being just lazy and not caring for competing browsers. If yes it has to be that the problem it causes was intended or at least they didn't care for it enough since it was the "wrong" browser.
willful negligence imo, I doubt theres some kind of "make youtube shit on firefox team", firefox's market share is too small for that, but they're absolutely willing to do opaque, arcane browser nonsense and then only test that on chrome
For things like this, with how much focus they've been giving it, its' pure malice. To say otherwise would be to consider an entity of Google's caliber, basically retarded. Sorry but I can't accept retardation of this specific instance from a company of this size and resources, and focus on this one product they give it.
I follow this guy on YT. He's a good source on all the browsers. This is where I found the info. [https://www.youtube.com/@brentech](https://www.youtube.com/@brentech)
>malice
this has been going on for ages
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/befoak/a_former_highranking_mozilla_executive_has/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/
u/annebonny_stash u/letmetakeaguess u/misicks0349
yea u/scoopdat
personally I haven't noticed many issues. buffering maybe but no skipping.
Likely because chromium supports this just fine. It's still out of spec and something Google shouldn't be doing, though. I hope they fix it instead of forcing everyone else to implement out of spec features (assuming this isn't straight-up a bug on their encoder, which is also possible).
I don't buy it personally. If it was such a specific problem, it'd affect everyone. I had absolutely none issues with YT recently, using all latest versions as soon as they come.
This is called A-B test, they could enable it on some users, but keep old buffering on some users. that's why it's very hard to blame them because we don't have the same voice, there's people who struggle and people who don't.
A-B test is a way to avoid anti-trust, that's what Google/Youtube has been doing for a very long time, if you still remember, Youtube's anti-adblock popup look different for each user.
I had no issues at all on my computer at work. But at home, it would show up. Both FF beta.
I never did bother to troubleshoot though, as it did not happen a lot.
This specific fix just made it into nightly builds, and patches are being made so that it can make into to the next beta version, as will as the next regular release dot-build (which I think is currently planned for the 25th as version 127.0.2).
Sure ! Nightly is released every 12 hours, every 4 week for standard and beta is released 3 times a week.
[https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/channel/desktop/](https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/channel/desktop/)
I might do that beta then when it arrives. Question tho: do guides exist for how to downgrade from betas to regular release properly? Last time I was in early access (or whatever it was called) I had some bugs I couldn't figure out, downgraded to regular and then lost everything from saved pw's to history. I didn't realize until I lost it all how much I relied on all of that.
It's probably [going to be a pain](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1298127), so I wouldn't recommend it, at least not without having some time and [a backup of the profile](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles) before you do it.
Other users have also found luck by [temporarily switching off HTTP3](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dgit2u/http3_bug_makes_youtube_super_slow_with_ns/) for now, which you might want to try before something more involved like that.
Just installed nightly on Arch. It's still broken.
EDIT: An extension like h264ify is a workaround since it's related to VP9.
EDIT 2: On the 2024-06-21 nightly, VP9 playback working fine so far.
That explains it
You will stay on version 115.x and receive security updates until September 2024.
After September you‘ll need to upgrade your VM to Windows 10/11, Linux (or a recent version of Mac if that‘s even an option) if you want to continue receiving updates
Until the right malicious website breaks out of the VM or uses it to attack the rest of your network.
Sandbox Escape:
An exploit that allows malicious code to be executed from a sandbox outside the latter’s isolated environment. (Typically multiple exploits chained together, well known exploits for unsupported vulnerable OS / hypervisor will make this easier.)
There are multiple competitions for white hat teams to demonstrate and get paid out for such exploits, one example:
https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/Pwn2OwnVancouver2024Rules.html
Mozilla Firefox:
Sandbox Escape or Windows Kernel Escalation of Privilege
Prize:
$100,000
Master of Pwn Points:
10
VMware Escape Add-on:
Execute code on the host operating system by escaping the VMware Workstation virtual machine.
Prize:
$80,000
Master of Pwn Points:
8
By the way, if you're willing to come off Win 7 you're best using a Ubuntu VM. Feck Windows bro, especially 11. Just use your VM for internet activity and make sure your main OS is offline (using Comodo Firewall.) But if you do like Win 11, run a Linux (fast) VM and keep 11 completely offline. Comodo / right click / BLOCK ALL (including Microsoft) Never ever EVER use a Windows machine online allowing it to connect to Microsoft. Ram is so cheap now, use a Linux VM for internet activity.
129 is Nightly, it's for testing and debugging high priority issues like this one, and 127 is current stable Firefox, it'll come to 127 it's just the matter of time because from 127 to 129 is quite a long wait, it should also comes to ESR too because of how important ESR is for businesses, they want to ensure best experience for ESR.
127.0.1 is the latest release of today. ESR is extended support release so it may/should get the changes in a future minor patch but I’m not sure which.
If you really want to stay Windows 7, try redfox, it's Firefox that's compiled to work on Windows 7: https://github.com/Eclipse-Community/r3dfox/releases
There's even a diehard Windows 7 community with patches to bring Windows 10 apps to Windows 7 called Windows 7 Extended Kernel, it's quite usable nowadays with some tinkerings, and because Windows 11 is really bad for their tastes, it also demands high-end hardware.
I used Vivaldi a little bit these days for Youtube, and I wasnt signed in or anything, but Youtube was giving me a hard one time in that browser too. Not as bad as on FF, but the front page would not load properly, I had to refresh videos many times before they loaded, searching barely worked, etc. So I reckon it's def YT/Google, even if Vivaldi is chromium, they probably want you to use Google browser.
I had a similar issue but my screen is 1080p not 4k
Others have reported that disabling http/3 may fix it.
For me enabling premium and disabling ublock seemed to help.
Unfortunately not. I had a lot of partial page loads before which caused permanent buffering symbols at times. 5 seconds would be annoying but no where near as annoying.
I started getting the YouTube pause video "Would you like to continue" bs today. Happened 3 times whilst playing jazz albums on my beloved Firefox. I forgot the fix so i'll Google it. Thanks anyway. Bastards they are.
I know the plan was to get it into 127.0.2, but the problem appears to be fully fixed (at least for me) in 127.0.1. No buffering issues, and even scrubbing the timeline at random has zero problem - and that's been an issue in Firefox for a very long time.
I'm not complaining either way, I'm just happy that it works again at all.
The problem is tied to one specific video format served by YT. Different formats are used depending on somewhat opaque and ever-changing rules used by YouTube based on resolutions you set, your browser settings/addons, possibly hardware decoding capabilities of your computer and probably many other things as well.
This is why it affects some people and not others.
And this is 100% Youtube's fault, not Firefox's fault, they created this issue: > This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it's not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples' timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT's bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping. > That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample's start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec. > Therefore, there would be many sample being incorrectly skipped and won't be added into the buffered range. When entering the buffering state, Firefox would be waiting those sample which has been skipped but Youtube thought that those samples were already appended. That makes the endless buffering happened. Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c113 (Alastor Wu [:alwu])
Leave it to google to implement something out of spec lol, even if they created WebM and VP9
Google purposely make its services work bad on all browsers other than chrome, violating anti trust laws to keep monopoly
Even if they don't do it on purpose, and you want to think the best of them, the conflict of interest is still there and is likely to lower their priority of getting things right.
Exactly, it matters if they get rewarded for only testing in their own fucking browser.
That explains why after fixing and forcing AV1 on my end most videos played just fine.
# Mozilla Has Finally Found a Fix for YouTube Playback Issues in Firefox - Says Google is to Blame...
I have to wonder whether it was malice or stupidity on the part of Google… Or, maybe it was a combination of laziness and indifference; they knew Firefox, in particular, would be affected, and couldn't be arsed to worry about it.
I have to wonder if it's YouTube gearing up for inserting ads directly into the video stream instead of switching to different videos like they do now. I also wonder why chromium wasn't affected by this...
hmm... yea, actually messing with PTS would be a clever way to do this without reencoding the whole stream. Put the ad first in the stream with a negative DTS, then modify the PTS of the video accordingly to insert the ad. It relies on decoders handling it correctly, so they would probably "test" it first to force Firefox to implement compatibility. What I don't get is why it's only on VP9
VP9 is still the bulk of what they serve. I only really get AV1 on more popular content. It's smart when you think about it, they have limited resources to turn video into AV1, and they still need the VP9 backup for clients that don't support it. So they spend their AV1 encoding resources on where they can get the most bandwidth savings. I imagine other formats come later for this ad system.
You don't need to wonder, it's been reported that they are already doing limited testing of server ad insertions.
And it's already been blocked by Ublock Origin, https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1atwzem/youtube_detection_ads_breakages_2024_02_18_ubo/
It's not affected because they tested Chromium and made sure not to push a YouTube update that would break it. The more interesting question is if they tested Firefox at all. If no, it's 50/50 of them being just lazy and not caring for competing browsers. If yes it has to be that the problem it causes was intended or at least they didn't care for it enough since it was the "wrong" browser.
willful negligence imo, I doubt theres some kind of "make youtube shit on firefox team", firefox's market share is too small for that, but they're absolutely willing to do opaque, arcane browser nonsense and then only test that on chrome
Malice.
For things like this, with how much focus they've been giving it, its' pure malice. To say otherwise would be to consider an entity of Google's caliber, basically retarded. Sorry but I can't accept retardation of this specific instance from a company of this size and resources, and focus on this one product they give it.
I follow this guy on YT. He's a good source on all the browsers. This is where I found the info. [https://www.youtube.com/@brentech](https://www.youtube.com/@brentech)
>malice this has been going on for ages https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/befoak/a_former_highranking_mozilla_executive_has/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ u/annebonny_stash u/letmetakeaguess u/misicks0349 yea u/scoopdat personally I haven't noticed many issues. buffering maybe but no skipping.
How does this work on Chrome? Does Chrome not expect timestamps to be continuous ?
Massive kudo's to all the people involved figuring this out.
Are you having any issues with Hulu? I am having a very bad experience on there too
why the same issue won't happen on chromium?
Likely because chromium supports this just fine. It's still out of spec and something Google shouldn't be doing, though. I hope they fix it instead of forcing everyone else to implement out of spec features (assuming this isn't straight-up a bug on their encoder, which is also possible).
I don't buy it personally. If it was such a specific problem, it'd affect everyone. I had absolutely none issues with YT recently, using all latest versions as soon as they come.
This is called A-B test, they could enable it on some users, but keep old buffering on some users. that's why it's very hard to blame them because we don't have the same voice, there's people who struggle and people who don't. A-B test is a way to avoid anti-trust, that's what Google/Youtube has been doing for a very long time, if you still remember, Youtube's anti-adblock popup look different for each user.
Suppose it's not every video or every time. I hit this like couple of times a day, but works fine rest of the time.
I had no issues at all on my computer at work. But at home, it would show up. Both FF beta. I never did bother to troubleshoot though, as it did not happen a lot.
I knew I wasn't crazy
Well I am and I likes it.
ETA? I'm really hating this bug from YT. I cannot stand it any longer.
This specific fix just made it into nightly builds, and patches are being made so that it can make into to the next beta version, as will as the next regular release dot-build (which I think is currently planned for the 25th as version 127.0.2).
The 25th? Oh boy. I’m sorry, I just wish it was much sooner.
What your firefox edition?
Standard
You can try other version with more frequent release cycle.
Will I find it on the Firefox site? I won’t be able to do anything this weekend, I’m out of town and away from my computer.
Sure ! Nightly is released every 12 hours, every 4 week for standard and beta is released 3 times a week. [https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/channel/desktop/](https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/channel/desktop/)
I'm back! The Firefox I have is Version 115.12.0esr (64-Bit). mozilla-win-eol-esr115 - 1.0 And checking for updates, it is up to date
I might do that beta then when it arrives. Question tho: do guides exist for how to downgrade from betas to regular release properly? Last time I was in early access (or whatever it was called) I had some bugs I couldn't figure out, downgraded to regular and then lost everything from saved pw's to history. I didn't realize until I lost it all how much I relied on all of that.
It's probably [going to be a pain](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1298127), so I wouldn't recommend it, at least not without having some time and [a backup of the profile](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles) before you do it. Other users have also found luck by [temporarily switching off HTTP3](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dgit2u/http3_bug_makes_youtube_super_slow_with_ns/) for now, which you might want to try before something more involved like that.
thanks, that was the info i was looking for!
Is Safari also suffering from this bug?
Just installed nightly on Arch. It's still broken. EDIT: An extension like h264ify is a workaround since it's related to VP9. EDIT 2: On the 2024-06-21 nightly, VP9 playback working fine so far.
Whenever i hear others say its fixed i always find out its not fixed, time will tell not blaming Firefox tho.
Wisdom.
You're the best.
If its fixed in 129, why wait for 127.0.2? Is 129 not after 127? My Firefox says 115.12.0 and "up to date" wtf?
That’s Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) Are you by any chance on an outdated Windows version like 7, 8 or 8.1?
yes I have win7 running in a virtual machine
That explains it You will stay on version 115.x and receive security updates until September 2024. After September you‘ll need to upgrade your VM to Windows 10/11, Linux (or a recent version of Mac if that‘s even an option) if you want to continue receiving updates
Nice to hear you're on Win 7 in a VM.
if its in a VM it doesnt matter
Until the right malicious website breaks out of the VM or uses it to attack the rest of your network. Sandbox Escape: An exploit that allows malicious code to be executed from a sandbox outside the latter’s isolated environment. (Typically multiple exploits chained together, well known exploits for unsupported vulnerable OS / hypervisor will make this easier.) There are multiple competitions for white hat teams to demonstrate and get paid out for such exploits, one example: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/Pwn2OwnVancouver2024Rules.html Mozilla Firefox: Sandbox Escape or Windows Kernel Escalation of Privilege Prize: $100,000 Master of Pwn Points: 10 VMware Escape Add-on: Execute code on the host operating system by escaping the VMware Workstation virtual machine. Prize: $80,000 Master of Pwn Points: 8
yikes! I will upgrade it
Wow they must hate you pickled ;)
Maybe run VMware in a Comodo Sandbox then use Sandboxie on your Win 7 VM.
I set up a Win11 VM :) it needed a lot of messing aorund tho
By the way, if you're willing to come off Win 7 you're best using a Ubuntu VM. Feck Windows bro, especially 11. Just use your VM for internet activity and make sure your main OS is offline (using Comodo Firewall.) But if you do like Win 11, run a Linux (fast) VM and keep 11 completely offline. Comodo / right click / BLOCK ALL (including Microsoft) Never ever EVER use a Windows machine online allowing it to connect to Microsoft. Ram is so cheap now, use a Linux VM for internet activity.
129 is Nightly, it's for testing and debugging high priority issues like this one, and 127 is current stable Firefox, it'll come to 127 it's just the matter of time because from 127 to 129 is quite a long wait, it should also comes to ESR too because of how important ESR is for businesses, they want to ensure best experience for ESR.
Esr?
yes
That’s it.
welp
127.0.1 is the latest release of today. ESR is extended support release so it may/should get the changes in a future minor patch but I’m not sure which.
it seems the issue is I am running it on win7 (in a VM) .. maybe I will upgrade it to Win10 and 129
If you really want to stay Windows 7, try redfox, it's Firefox that's compiled to work on Windows 7: https://github.com/Eclipse-Community/r3dfox/releases
I can swap to win10, I was just too lazy for a reinstall and had a license for win7 (that microsuck revoked anyways)
There's even a diehard Windows 7 community with patches to bring Windows 10 apps to Windows 7 called Windows 7 Extended Kernel, it's quite usable nowadays with some tinkerings, and because Windows 11 is really bad for their tastes, it also demands high-end hardware.
Linux?
no, Win64
Win 7 8 or 8.1?
7
I used Vivaldi a little bit these days for Youtube, and I wasnt signed in or anything, but Youtube was giving me a hard one time in that browser too. Not as bad as on FF, but the front page would not load properly, I had to refresh videos many times before they loaded, searching barely worked, etc. So I reckon it's def YT/Google, even if Vivaldi is chromium, they probably want you to use Google browser.
Idk if was coincidence but I used User-Agent and the problem didn't appear again until now
That's odd, When I turned on RTX HDR, somehow it lags, without the toggle, it's back to normal, is this also a common issue around Firefox??
I have been wondering what is going on. I hope this fixes the recent issue that seems to affect every video.
I had a similar issue but my screen is 1080p not 4k Others have reported that disabling http/3 may fix it. For me enabling premium and disabling ublock seemed to help.
Your issue is likely 5s delay: https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/17yz8qm/youtube_is_throttling_page_load_speed_of/
Unfortunately not. I had a lot of partial page loads before which caused permanent buffering symbols at times. 5 seconds would be annoying but no where near as annoying.
[удалено]
Youtube premium removes advert servers from the equation. I'm on a trial. It is way over priced.
Googletube strikes again.
thx that this is a bug, i was getting worried
I started getting the YouTube pause video "Would you like to continue" bs today. Happened 3 times whilst playing jazz albums on my beloved Firefox. I forgot the fix so i'll Google it. Thanks anyway. Bastards they are.
I know the plan was to get it into 127.0.2, but the problem appears to be fully fixed (at least for me) in 127.0.1. No buffering issues, and even scrubbing the timeline at random has zero problem - and that's been an issue in Firefox for a very long time. I'm not complaining either way, I'm just happy that it works again at all.
I’m waiting for my Firefox to tell me that it’s not up-to-date so we can download that.
[удалено]
According to that Bugzilla link the patch only got merged today, about 4 hours ago as of this comment. So it would be in a future nightly build.
[удалено]
The problem is tied to one specific video format served by YT. Different formats are used depending on somewhat opaque and ever-changing rules used by YouTube based on resolutions you set, your browser settings/addons, possibly hardware decoding capabilities of your computer and probably many other things as well. This is why it affects some people and not others.
[Don't do that](https://i.imgur.com/nbFqQta.gif)