For approximately four months, some Firefox users have experienced video playback issues while playing videos on YouTube.
Affected users noted that certain videos would stop playing on the site all of a sudden. YouTube would show a loading animation and it appeared that buffering was the culprit in many cases.
When Mozilla started to analyze the issue, it quickly discovered that 1080p or higher quality videos were affected only.
In particular, Mozilla discovered that 1080p, 2k and 4k videos on YouTube were affected when played in Firefox. The issues did not occur on every video playback and not for every user.
The issue is linked to the VP9 protocol that Google uses on YouTube.
Mozilla is keeping track of the issue here, but there is no fix available yet. This has not stopped some of the affected users from trying different things to get the issue fixed on their end.
Here are three solutions that worked for some affected users, but not for all of them:
- Reduce the video quality with a click on the settings icon in the video player and the selection of quality from the menu that opens.
- Install the enhanced-h264ify extension for Firefox. The extension switches playback to H.264 by default, but you can experiment with different codecs to see if any work.
- Try setting the value of network.http.http3.enable to False on about:config.
These workarounds worked for some of the affected users, but not for everyone. Some lower the video quality, but they at least let affected users watch the videos that do not work otherwise.
Another option is to switch to a different browser for the time being, all Chromium-based browsers work, which should not surprise anyone, or third-party services such as Invidious or Freetube.
Did you experience issues on YouTube lately? Google has been cracking down on adblock users heavily in recent time.
Both h264ify and Enhanced h264ify make the players max resolution only 1080 and Enhanced h264ify can’t even block vp9 or opus audio. As it stands now, they are both useless for 1080+ resolutions. I didn’t buy a good monitor to watch 1080 videos.
Apparently Mozilla devs now finally found a way to fix this and are planning to release it in version 127.0.2
Better late than never..
I play YouTube videos (channels, playlists) on a ‘Piped’ instance which lets the user choose between AV1, VP9 and AVC (h264). I choose AVC only not because others don’t render correctly but because AVC is the one that uses the less CPU, significantly.
I have no idea if a userscript I used in the past when I was still accessing YouTube servers directly still works correctly, one can always give it a try :
Youtube HD at [https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23661-youtube-hd]
Concerning HTTP3, I’ve disabled it with others of the lot since it’s been available :
// HTTP/3 – disable HTTP3/QUIC support
pref(“network.http.http3.enable”, false); // DEFAULT=true
// HTTP/3 – disable HTTP/3 0-RTT (round-trip time)
pref(“network.http.http3.enable_0rtt”, false); // DEFAULT=true
// HTTP/3 – disable HTTP/3 qlog
pref(“network.http.http3.enable_qlog”, false); // DEFAULT=false
Wikipedia states that “HTTP/3 has lower latency for real-world web pages, if enabled on the server, and loads faster than with HTTP/2, in some cases over three times faster than HTTP/1.1”
I had tested with and without, noticed NO difference (with HTTP/2, never tested compared to HTTP/1), so exit HTTP3.
I think that several so-called “improvements” have flourished over and for the networks which basically improve practically nothing whilst engaging for some side-effects which may not be welcomed, and i think HTTP3 is one of those, alongside various pre-fetching features.