Google disrupted YouTube video playback on Firefox, again - gHacks Tech News

Clearly this isn't an anti-competition effort.

Oh lol so that was it, yesterday all of a sudden 1440p and 4k videos were unwatchable, it was a stutter fest and thought something was wrong with my gpu.

I have had the same issue for at least a month now. I use YouTube Premium, the fuck am I paying for?

Reminder for everyone to use a user-agent spoofing extension to make their Firefox appear to be chrome/another browser to Google

I stopped watching on their website due to this. It's faster and I get better scalers on ytdl(p)+mpv

I solved a lot of performance issues I had with yt playback by disabling Ambient Mode (it's hidden under cog menu in the player). No clue why, but it was causing massve CPU usage.

For months I’ve had problems with YouTube videos in Firefox, at any resolution. They would play at really low FPS. Sometimes the player would pause and continue at the correct FPS, but usually not. Skipping backwards or forwards usually fixes it but not always. Another step in their monopoly to destroy competition.

Invidious on PC,

Grayjay on Android.

You're welcome.

I love freetube

I happens to me but all i thought was that YouTube was bad not Firefox.

Badly muxed VP9 stream? Is that where they tried to stuff ads into it?

If it doesn't load quickly or properly, I just don't watch it, which ultimately hurts Google.

No such problems with yt-dlp + mpv. And still no injected ads.

I use Librewolf with Ublock and sponsorblock. Sometimes youtube video stops loading or keeps seeking 5-10 seconds forward. However, reloading the page helps. I don't have such problems when watching Youtube with mpv.

I have issues with YouTube playback specifically on my work laptop. At home it's fine. It just started one day where videos sometimes fail to auto play and requires multiple refreshes. Even once they get going they often stall out and the progress bar goes all the way back to the beginning so I've gotten in the habit of taking notes of the time before I hit refresh and hope it comes back before I completely lose all interest.

I'd use Piped instead, but it has literally never once worked for me. Videos never load.

Permanently Deleted

The youtube ui is so slow I don't use it, even back when I was using chrome. Thanks invidious!

My videos play fine but my side bar is completely gone. No recommended videos, no similar videos, no playlist. Works fine on my other PC.

this is frustating i had to use open with potplayer extension most of times.

Affected users might have blamed Firefox for the issue. Some may even have switched to a Chromium-based browser, as these worked without any issue.

I've been having issues with YouTube on Firefox for ages, not these issues, different ones. I haven't bothered to test if it's only Firefox that has the problem because I'm not using Firefox for a seamless experience, I'm using because why the fuck would I use anything else on Linux? I won't put google or ms into a Linux environment, even if I don't really care about privacy or whatever, it just feels like mixing oil and water.

Might use another browser like brave or whatever foss solutions are out there, but I'd be surprised if anything like that is better than Firefox.

They work fine on Brave Browser.

I resorted to having Chrome for work things, Opera for Youtube and Firefox for the good stuff. Divide and conquer, I guess.