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My Browser Builds (Part 3)


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4 hours ago, mixit said:

programmers often tend to be pretty lazy when having to do maintenance tasks, because these aren't seen as "cool" and "innovative"...

When you have an infinite number of tasks with higher priority, it's practically impossible to find time for polishing things like that so unless the bug is actively causing havoc on significant scale, it may take years before it's fixed, if ever, and in case of commercial software, you probably won't get the version with the fix for free.

Mozilla also hasn't fixed slow WebGL in Firefox on XP and this is still an open issue on Linux, where there's also a problem (though technicalities differ).

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6 hours ago, nicolaasjan said:

But note "throttled" in the above output. Maybe that can be the culprit?

 

2 hours ago, modnar said:

I experience a ~16s freeze but I don't want to lower quality because of that, so 4GB of RAM doesn't help really.

Thanks guys.

Have you personally experienced this with Firefox on YouTube - no problem on 480p but often image freezes while audio plays on 720p?
Often happens even 30-60 seconds after video starts.

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(youtube 23min-bug video hickup)

mixit said:
> Let me give you a rough rundown of the process I went through with this

INCREDIBLE!!
Amazing. Although I can *imagine* such mysterious bug researching is an awful lot of work, outlining the single steps and weeks in detail makes it really - WHOA....

Am I reading this right? In older browser versions just flipping this pref would fix it too??
media.use_cubeb = false

IMO a potential sabotaging Moz or Google coder wouldn't have to examine the issue up to the last dot, like you. All they'd need is to get the big picture, after finding which little edit wreaks havoc with other browsers, regardless if the exact reasons are fully known. From what Firefox devs mentioned, such "glitches" seemed to happen a bit too regularly and incidentally always to harm other browsers.
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9 hours ago, we3fan said:

Have you personally experienced this with Firefox on YouTube - no problem on 480p but often image freezes while audio plays on 720p?
Often happens even 30-60 seconds after video starts.

Could you give an example URL of such a video?

So I can try on Firefox.

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On 7/27/2021 at 6:23 PM, UCyborg said:

When you have an infinite number of tasks with higher priority, it's practically impossible to find time for polishing things like that so unless the bug is actively causing havoc on significant scale, it may take years before it's fixed, if ever, and in case of commercial software, you probably won't get the version with the fix for free.

Mozilla also hasn't fixed slow WebGL in Firefox on XP and this is still an open issue on Linux, where there's also a problem (though technicalities differ).

I don't disagree, more important things to do can always be found, but in this case it wasn't really about polishing anything. If only their tests had included playing a 40-45 min video (the net length of a typical episode of a 1-hour TV show - a frequent use case), they'd have caught this problem immediately, as soon as they started using cubeb. The issue wasn't intermittent, it would happen whenever you watched a video straight through long enough. I can't believe a sane tester or developer would knowingly let an issue like this fester. Around the time of Firefox 15.0, XP was still big.

But since they didn't catch this in their own tests, the whole thing became dependent on enough people noticing the exact pattern and reporting it. And people don't normally pay precise enough attention to this type of stuff. Speaking of myself: I'd like to think I'm pretty observant :yes:, but I didn't really notice this pattern even when I was already intellectually aware of it after having read about it - because I routinely skip over opening titles and often jump back or forward to rewatch some scene or skip a boring one, so even though I did see the freezes, they almost never happened at the same time mark for me.

So, a great many people would miss the pattern because of this type of scattering, others simply wouldn't pay enough attention or would attribute it to something else, and only a select few would report it to Mozilla. And since many of them saw this happening on Youtube becuse that's where they watched most of their videos, it would become known as "an intermittent YT video issue" (a complete and utter misnomer, as we now know!), one of great many Firefox was having with the site. And since there weren't enough reports, no one really bothered to look into it properly. If they had, I'm sure their media guys like Pearce or Avenard would have pinpointed the problem location in a fraction of the time it took me.

In retrospect, I regret that I never took the time back then to at least find out where the freeze problem started and give Mozilla a detailed report on it. But it was too minor an annoyance for me personally, and easy to work around; and at the time the buck stopped with Mozilla and you could always hope that maybe eventually they'd get this fixed. :rolleyes: Nowadays, though, the buck basically stopped with me, so... :lol:

As for WebGL, of course that sucks, but I think optimizing functionality is a very different kind of issue compared to fixing something that clearly shouldn't be happening at all.

 

On 7/27/2021 at 5:23 PM, modnar said:

Hallelujah!!!

Now this is resolved! I'm very thankful for your time in fixing and testing and providing a fix, @mixit, for our favorite browser and of course @roytam1 for implementing it in all XP browsers!

WOOHOO! SuperSweet! Shaderlicious and such. :D:cool::thumbup

Hey, wait with the party until @roytam1 actually does a build with this! :lol: But I appreciate the kind words. :) 

On 7/28/2021 at 3:54 AM, siria said:

INCREDIBLE!!
Amazing. Although I can *imagine* such mysterious bug researching is an awful lot of work, outlining the single steps and weeks in detail makes it really - WHOA....

Am I reading this right? In older browser versions just flipping this pref would fix it too??
media.use_cubeb = false

Thanks :), but to be honest it wasn't really that hard a problem to solve in terms of complexity. The main obstacle was that it was tediously time consuming and you always had to wait another half and hour before you knew what the next step would be. :boring: I actually took a break for a couple of months between when I found out cubeb was the problem and when I started looking into what exactly the problem was, because running these long test sessions on the background all the time was getting in the way of focusing on other things...

As for the pref: yes, but only for a short while. I don't remember exactly when, but sydneyaudio was removed pretty soon afterwards. (And, technically, it still had this problem, but it'd only manifest after every 3 hrs or so, thus hardly anyone would notice.)

 

Edited by mixit
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@mixit.

Finally a fix, that's been a problem for a long time. I just tested it again in XP and the usual buffering was around 25:12. No reason for Mozilla not to have resolved it, there were plenty of complaints so they had to know. Probably too busy messing with the UI to be bothered with real bugs and then they wonder why their user base keeps dwindling.

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On 7/27/2021 at 9:10 PM, mixit said:
  • Woohoo! :cheerleader:But I still have to test, test, test, test... Including with 27+ hrs of playback... :blink:
  • Here ends the abbreviated version of my great journey, :D

Wow.:w00t: I did not expect somebody ever find bug causing 23 min error. Congratulations.:thumbup Bravo!:worship: I cant wait now for roytam1 implementing it in all his XP browsers.

Say, what site with video you using with old FF14 version to catch a bug? Cause not a lot sites are even would play any video with F15 or 14 this days.

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5 hours ago, mixit said:

Thanks :), but to be honest it wasn't really that hard a problem to solve in terms of complexity. The main obstacle was that it was tediously time consuming and you always had to wait another half and hour before you knew what the next step would be. :boring: I actually took a break for a couple of months between when I found out cubeb was the problem and when I started looking into what exactly the problem was, because running these long test sessions on the background all the time was getting in the way of focusing on other things...

would you mind if I submit your work to https://github.com/mozilla/cubeb (credit to you of course)?

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When there was Firefox 15, the video was watched in flash-plugin

No problem 23 minutes in VLC or WMP plugins

Flash player on Youtube was disabled at the beginning of 50 versions Firefox

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

Firefox 52 - Release Date 2017-03-07

07.2017 - When Flash on Youtube was completely removed

Edited by grey_rat
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On 7/28/2021 at 11:37 PM, DanR20 said:

Finally a fix, that's been a problem for a long time. I just tested it again in XP and the usual buffering was around 25:12. No reason for Mozilla not to have resolved it, there were plenty of complaints so they had to know. Probably too busy messing with the UI to be bothered with real bugs and then they wonder why their user base keeps dwindling.

Most of the complaints I've seen have been on their support site though, not at Bugzilla where the devs would see them first hand. And there never seemed to be that many people joining in and confirming the bug. The point @grey_rat kindly reminded us about would also definitely play a role in this. In any case, far be it from me to absolve Mozilla from its responsibility, I've mostly just been meaning to point out that there have been interfering factors along the way that don't (in this case) necessarily involve full-on Google agents within Mozilla's ranks. :ph34r:

On 7/29/2021 at 12:34 AM, Rod Steel said:

Wow.:w00t: I did not expect somebody ever find bug causing 23 min error. Congratulations.:thumbup Bravo!:worship: I cant wait now for roytam1 implementing it in all his XP browsers.

Say, what site with video you using with old FF14 version to catch a bug? Cause not a lot sites are even would play any video with F15 or 14 this days.

Thanks! :) After I found that it didn't matter if I used an online stream or a local file, I just downloaded a a random longish file VP8 WEBM video from search results, which happened to be this one. As you said, you won't be able to stream it because FF 15.0 can't handle the current HTTPS ciphers, but you can play it locally. (I've got to say, by the time I was finally done with the fix, I was totally haunted by the faces of those debate participants! :crazy:)

On 7/29/2021 at 2:34 AM, roytam1 said:

would you mind if I submit your work to https://github.com/mozilla/cubeb (credit to you of course)?

Sure thing, go for it :thumbup, but maybe wait until people have had a chance to play with your builds? I'd thought of this too, but I didn't want to bring it up before it's been confirmed that the fix works well for everyone. But there'd definitely be some nice irony in getting this XP-specific fix into the current Firefox code via their stand-alone cubeb lib, after they took great care to remove all traces of XP from their main tree! :lol:

On 7/29/2021 at 10:29 AM, grey_rat said:

When there was Firefox 15, the video was watched in flash-plugin

That's an excellent point! :worship: It's been a long time since I switched from Flash to the Primetime codec for H.264, so Mozilla's messing around with H.264 and especially its support on XP has faded from memory a bit. Yeah, those watching MP4/H.264 stuff using the Flash player wouldn't see this 2x:xx issue (I think - never tested for it specifically) and wouldn't have anything to report until maybe the last few XP-compatible Firefox versions, by which time Mozilla barely cared about XP any more. And VP8/9, which Firefox supported natively, were mostly available on Youtube, hence the strong association with the site for a long time.

Edited by mixit
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On 7/28/2021 at 10:36 AM, nicolaasjan said:

Could you give an example URL of such a video?

So I can try on Firefox.

This video URL for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HagVnWAeGcM
I tested on Firefox ESR 52.9.0 with new clean profile and no Add-ons:
480p - no problems at all
720p - image freezes but audio keeps playing, image froze 3-4 times from 0:00 to 2:00, usually freeze time lasts 7 seconds.
Chrome 49, 720p - no problems at all.
Maybe I need to install some additional Codec or Firefox Plugin, not sure.

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59 minutes ago, we3fan said:

Maybe I need to install some additional Codec or Firefox Plugin, not sure

Right-clink on the playing video, select "Stats for nerds" (or whatever it is called now), and compare between FF and Chrome.

Maybe one browser uses H.264 while the other uses VP8/9?

 

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2 hours ago, we3fan said:

This video URL for example:
Mr Bean in Room 426 | Episode 8 | Widescreen Version | Classic Mr Bean
I tested on Firefox ESR 52.9.0 with new clean profile and no Add-ons:
480p - no problems at all
720p - image freezes but audio keeps playing, image froze 3-4 times from 0:00 to 2:00, usually freeze time lasts 7 seconds.
Chrome 49, 720p - no problems at all.
Maybe I need to install some additional Codec or Firefox Plugin, not sure.

Hmm...

No problem here:

Viewport / Frames   1280x720 / 0 dropped of 10713
Current / Optimal Res   1280x720@25 / 1280x720@25
Volume / Normalized   100% / 100% (content loudness -9.0dB)
Codecs   av01.0.05M.08 (398) / opus (251)


 

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