# Awful Frame drops when watching Youtube videos.



## Kraust (Sep 5, 2019)

I am having awful Frame drops when viewing youtube videos on 12.0-RELEASE-p10, So far I have tried running both Firefox (latest) and Chrome and have seen the same lag/hitches on basically every video. Coincidentally, if I watch the same videos in mpv, I don't see any hitches.

When I was running 13-CURRENT, I did not see this problem, and I was wondering if anyone was aware of anything like this.

I'm using an AMD Ryzen 1700, and a RTX 2070 if that information is important. I don't see any high CPU or GPU usage in either case.


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## CraigHB (Sep 5, 2019)

I've seen something similar, but not the same.  I have a TV box running Linux and Kodi.  I got a Widevine update recently that messed up the player, same thing, frame drops causing stutters and hangs.  Had to downgrade to the older version to get things working well again.  New version libwidevinecdm.so.4.10.1440.18, older version I fell back too libwidevinecdm.so.4.10.1303.0


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## shkhln (Sep 5, 2019)

Kraust said:


> I am having awful Frame drops when viewing youtube videos on 12.0-RELEASE-p10, So far I have tried running both Firefox (latest) and Chrome and have seen the same lag/hitches on basically every video. Coincidentally, if I watch the same videos in mpv, I don't see any hitches.



Download some video, then drag-n-drop into a new tab for comparison. Also check Vimeo.


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## Kraust (Sep 5, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Download some video, then drag-n-drop into a new tab for comparison. Also check Vimeo.



Nice catch! I dragged a webm into Chrome and it was showing the same stuttering.
I also see it in Vimeo but much less.

Does the webm thing imply this could be a disk issue? I'm using zfs striping across 2 SSDs, which I hadn't previously used.


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## shkhln (Sep 6, 2019)

Kraust said:


> Nice catch! I dragged a webm into Chrome and it was showing the same stuttering. I also see it in Vimeo but much less.



Different codec maybe?



Kraust said:


> Does the webm thing imply



Webm doesn't imply anything, it's just a container format.



Kraust said:


> this could be a disk issue? I'm using zfs striping across 2 SSDs, which I hadn't previously used.



You said it works fine in mpv, so most likely no.


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## Kraust (Sep 6, 2019)

So far I've tried:
Watching both vp9 and h264 versions of the same video through mpv => No hiccups.
Watching the same video on Youtube through h264ify & verifying that the code is not vp9 => Still getting hiccups, but they appear to be fewer.

All of this has been done on Chromium because, it was the one I had opened
Changing Quality doesn't seem to make a difference.
Why is my browser struggling to decode videos? This is odd.


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## tOsYZYny (Oct 28, 2020)

I am having the same issue - mpv works well.  One other thing to point out is that I was previously running vlc and mplayer and mplayer struggles with higher quality videos most likely due to only using a single CPU core.  I wonder if chromium is having the same problem and how we might fix it.  I do not experience this issue on Linux distributions if that helps.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 29, 2020)

tOsYZYny I do not have this issue on Chromium or Firefox.


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## tOsYZYny (Oct 29, 2020)

Ok, are you using chromium and firefox installed from pkg or built from ports?  I should also point out that I have an nVidia Geforce 1050 Ti, so it's not like my graphics card is slow.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 29, 2020)

I just rebuilt my workstation from packages but, before this, I had built them from source. 
I'm using an old nVidia GT9600.


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## tOsYZYny (Oct 29, 2020)

Ok, so your CPU usage doesn't spike when watching HD videos?  I'm running ZFS, /tmp for me is an actual filesystem, not memory as I believe Linux generally configures it to be.  Perhaps I should try that.


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## tOsYZYny (Dec 23, 2020)

I am still having this issue on Chromium.  Firefox for me doesn't have the problem to the same extent.  I only use Chromium.  Additionally, I see the same problem when I use Citrix Workspaces to remote into work and playback video.  The video skips frames and the audio breaks and becomes difficult to listen to.

Is there something that can be done to make this experience better?  I am using an Nvidia GeForce 1050 Ti, so it has plenty of power.


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## SirDice (Dec 23, 2020)

tOsYZYny said:


> I am using an Nvidia GeForce 1050 Ti, so it has plenty of power.


Do you have the x11/nvidia-driver installed?


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## tOsYZYny (Dec 23, 2020)

Yes - nvidia-driver-440.100_1.  I have the binary package installed.


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## SirDice (Dec 23, 2020)

With regards to multimedia/mplayer, try setting it to use VDPAU (option is on by default), if I recall correctly it uses XV by default.


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## tOsYZYny (Dec 23, 2020)

Hi SirDice - I use mpv and it runs smoothly.  My problem is with chromium only.  As I am remote, I use chromium to login to my remote workstation.  For the most part, it works fine; however, whenever I do videoconferencing, the audio can be pretty bad, so I end up using another device for audio (android).  Is there some sort of toggle I need to use to fix that issue?  I believe I have hardware acceleration enabled (as that is the default).


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## SirDice (Dec 23, 2020)

Remote access (through Citrix, RDP or anything else) is just not good enough for decent streaming video. I can't even get this to work reliably from a Windows to Windows system. All these remote access protocols are bitmap based, not really suited for high-bitrate streaming video type output. For work I have to use my own desktop to call in a skype meeting directly, through the VPN/Citrix type remote desktops I have to use I can barely get a decent audio connection, forget about streaming video over it.


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## tOsYZYny (Dec 23, 2020)

The audio is also choppy for any notification sound, ie, when Outlook plays a meeting notification, instead of hearing unbroken sound for 2 or 3 seconds it takes to do its chime, I hear some stuttering and some noise/tearing.

Lastly, I have a Windows laptop that I just tested this on, it is running Google Chrome (same version, but Google's branded version instead of the Open Source one I'm running on FreeBSD), and watching a webex recording over Citrix is smooth and there is no audio tearing at all.


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## SirDice (Dec 23, 2020)

tOsYZYny said:


> it is running Google Chrome (same version, but Google's branded version instead of the Open Source one


Chrome has a whole bunch of proprietary plugins, which Chromium (the open source version) doesn't have. There's also a difference in plugins between the Linux and FreeBSD versions, some plugins are only available in the Linux version for example (the most notable is Widevine DRM but that's probably not used with this). There's a thread detailing how to run the Linux version of Chrome, that may work better for you: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...n-google-chrome-linux-binary-on-freebsd.77559


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