Sometimes, videos on Youtube/Facebook/others load/buffer but won't play. Tried everything...

[pmoniz]

Hi everybody,

I have this problem for months already. I just don't know what else to do. If I have a game opened on a browser (chrome, mozilla, ...) and 1 video or facebook opened, the videos might crash, freeze or not play if I go from on tab to another. Sometimes I just press pause, watch tv for 5 seconds, when I press "play" is freezes or crashes. I think everything goes OK if I just have one tab opened watching a video, but If I have 2 or 3 tabs opened, this happenes. A lot of times I open a video on youtube, it loads the video and just won't play... I have to press F5 a lot of times until it starts playing and sometimes it just won't and I have to quit the video or close tabs

I tried so many things I even can't remember: disable hardware aceleration, update and/or downgrade drivers, uninstall Flash from the OS and keep the Flash of the browser (Chrome), Change the AMD configuration, searched for virus and malwares, run CCleaner, etc etc etc.

This is so frustrating, it really is... I don't know who else to ask for help, I searched everywhere on the internet and few have this problem and most of them solve it by disabling hardware aceleration. But mine keeps happening this problem. It happens with all browsers, with any type of videos: stream, youtube, facebook, etc.

Any sugestion would be really appreciated. Please help!

My best regards!

ADDICIONAL INFO:

- Windows 8.1

- Intel® Core™ i7-4510U with Intel® Turbo Boost

- AMD Radeon™ R7 M260

- 8GB RAM

[jeromiec83223024]

Make sure you have the latest graphics drivers installed.

Keep in mind that browser tabs consume resources.  Chrome will show the Flash crash dialog when the system runs out of memory.  If you have a complex game and a bunch of tabs running, that's not out of the realm of possibility.   In general, if that happens, it will take down all the Flash instances across all tabs.

[pmoniz]

Hello Jeromie,

Thank you so much for your attention and reply.

Like I mentioned in my inicial post, I did have the latest graphic drivers installed. I tried the latest on Toshiba and I tried the latest on AMD's official site, none of them did work, the problem mantains exactly the same.

Regarding the tab consuming. Well, even If I have 5, 6 or more open tabs with videos on each one of them, the RAM consumption is far from being saturated, it does not even consume half my 8GB RAM, so I really don't think that's the matter.

However, I did find something very important. I tried disabling the hardware acceleration on Google Chrome and it never solved the problem. But, 2 days ago, I tried disabling the same but on Firefox and It did not stuck or show any of the symptoms! That is a huge step.... However, I had to install Flash on Windows because it was not integrated on Firefox like it is on Chrome. So, what is going on here? Where is the issue? (1) Is it on the Graphic AMD Radeon R7? (2) Is it on Chrome's integrated Flash? (3) Is it on Chrome's build not allowing to fully disable hardware acceleation? (4) Is it because Chrome has a specific kind of memory usage?

I found another person with the EXACT same symptoms and she also has an AMD Radeon R7. That can't be a coincidence... So, I trongly believe the issue is the (1). However, I don't think (2) can be discarded, since I never had any problems running videos on Windows movie players. The problem can be circumvented by disabling the hardware acceleration, like in Firefox, but doing that on Chrome maintains the issues so I believe (3) is also happening. Finally, (4) could also happen at the same time as the other (1), (2) and (3) as a concomitant problem.

Once again, thank you for your reply Jeromie and I'm so sorry for the long post!

My best regards

[jeromiec83223024]

You can also exhaust GPU memory, and now that the browsers are hardware accelerated in addition to Flash, that puts more memory pressure on the graphics cards, but I'm not sure how you'd monitor that.  We *will* throw an out of memory condition if you exhaust GPU memory as well.

Flash Player in Chrome is a built-in component.  It's completely encapsulated, including settings.  The Chrome sandbox prevents that Flash Player instance from knowing about our accessing the shared resources used by the other Flash instances on the system.  This is great for security, but confusing if you're using multiple browsers regularly.

Anyway, you've disabled hardware acceleration in the NPAPI Flash Player that's used by Firefox, and your problem went away.  We know that if you don't use the GPU, you're good.  You could follow the same steps in Chrome to disable hardware acceleration there.  If performance is acceptable for you in that config, that's a totally viable workaround.

I don't have a good way to differentiate, but it seems like there are a couple possibilities:

1. There's a latent bug in the graphics driver that you're hitting, and it's not patched yet. 
   
   
2. You're exhausting the available GPU memory.
   
   
   1. For this one, if you're just running a bunch of browser tabs and you never hit this, but when you do something else GPU intensive, like running a 3D game, while doing the same thing, and you're hitting either the grey exclamation mark in Flash or a crashed plugin in Chrome, you probably have your answer.
      
      
   2. It's possible that I'm totally wrong.  If you're getting this in Firefox and you're getting a crash notification and not just the Grey exclamation point, I'd be really interested in seeing the crash log.  You can get it by going to about:crashes and submitting the link that corresponds with the time of the crash.  You can just copy and paste the address of the window that opens up in a reply here.  You don't need to wait for the processing message to complete.  It will happen in the background, even if you close the window.

[pmoniz]

Hello Jeromie,

I'm so sorry for not replying anymore.

Well.. I was glad that the problem was partially solved by using Firefox and disabling hardware acceleration.But I couldn't be more wrong. Problems keep happening but the symptoms are slightly different and require a little more usage to happen, like 1 or 2 or 3 more tabs than Chrome. So, problems maintain...

Another symptom I can tell you: Whenever I pause a video on JW Player (is this player running through flash?) and suspend my PC, when I resume windows and resume the video, it crashes EVERYTIME. I don't know what do to.Do you have any sugestion? any sugestion at all...

[jeromiec83223024]

In Firefox, type about:crashes in the address bar.

Click on the first couple links to submit them to Mozilla, and give me links to the pages that pop up.  I'll take a look and see if there's anything useful.

I'm pretty sure that current versions of JWPlayer can be configured to serve either Flash or HTML5 video.  It's getting hard to tell the difference these days.  What usually works is to just right-click on the video.  If it says About Flash Player, it's Flash.  Otherwise, it's probably HTML5.  That's not 100% true (some content providers suppress the Flash menu so it looks like HTML5), but short of digging around in developer tools, it's a good indicator.

[pmoniz]

Hello again,

It's kind of rare to find a crash. What happens is that the videos get stuck, they buffer.... but keep stuck. It rarely crashes. But soon as I get one, I will report it!

Do you have any other sugestions? this problem is a complete mess...

Thank you once again!!

[jeromiec83223024]

Oh, that's a little different than what I was thinking.

If you're on wireless, you might try plugging into your router by ethernet to see if the video becomes more reliable.  If it does, then we know that it's related to wireless connectivity, which you can tweak by identifying the channels with the least interference, or adding a wireless repeater, etc.  There are a bunch of easy and inexpensive options if that's what's going on.

[pmoniz]

Why would you assume it may be the wireless Jeromie? I can try, but I doubt it, since I can access the internet with my Phone even when the phone is 3x/4x further than the PC is right now

I did what you said with right-click on the JW Player, it didn't say "About Flash", so maybe I'm assuming it is HTML5... Do you know if the videos on Facebook are HTML5?

(btw, are you a staff member of Adobe?)

[jeromiec83223024]

Yeah, I'm an engineering manager on Flash Player.  I started working on Flash back around 2007, and I've looked at pretty much every bug that gets filed over the last several years.  I have a pretty good sense of the ways in which things break in Flash at this point.  Adobe doesn't offer technical support for free products like Flash, so I poke at the forums here and there when I have free time as a courtesy.  It helps me identify issues in the field as well. 

It's definitely worth comparing wireless vs. wired behavior if you have a cable handy.  The repeated buffering and stuck playback say to me that you're not able to get the data from the stream fast enough, or it's getting corrupted along the way.  If it was just coming up black or green all the time, or it was crashing, that would be more in-line with the kinds of video problems that would point to bugs in Flash itself.  I'm not saying do it forever, but it will either send us down a more productive path, or it's one more component in the larger system that we can eliminate.  It's also really easy to test, and pretty easy to make a big improvement if that's what is going on.

[pmoniz]

oh... So you are a member of Adobe's staff! That is a reason to worry. I say this because you certainly know all the bugs regarding Flash's history. And since you don't recoognize the symptoms I'm telling you, that could mean that it is not Flash related...

But anyway, I think you are not imagining right the problem. Videos buffer really fast, in just a second, I can buffer 1 min of video, for example and the video keeps stuck at 0:00, but in another tab the same video may be running without any problems! This is not the only symptom, if this doesn't happen, another one happens: The video is totally black, but it is running and we can hear the audio without any problems. And here's something strange... If I press the black area, the video won't stop! It appears that the video simply does not exist. So strange!!

Btw, I can't believe I did not give you 2 gifs I have demonstrating the issues! Please, take a look at them:

https://i.gyazo.com/a4b29272834970dfad2388fec2a28f72.gif

https://i.gyazo.com/0e41bfc8ce9e20137fa8974726faf711.gif

Once again, thank you so much for your attention and help, even when you're not "paid for it"!

[jeromiec83223024]

Yeah, that's really strange.  If you right-click on the videos, do they say About Flash Player?

[pmoniz]

These particular cases are Youtube's HTML5. But it happens in all videos in all browsers... Especially if I have Miniclip's "8-Ball Pool" game opened and Facebook's "Trivia Crack" opened. We these both opened, it's certain that videos will get stuck like I showed you with the gifs. So... I guess the videos may or may not be Flash, but if the games are... Flash can't be discarted.

It happens with these games but that is just an example, as it happens ith many other elements

[jeromiec83223024]

Well, it's definitely useful information.  We know that it's happening on both HTML and Flash content at least.  The play one frame and stop behavior is really strange though.  I'm definitely not seeing other people complain about this.

Rendering is generally driven off the clock, and one of the power saving strategies is to slow the clock way down.  I wonder if this is related to buggy power-saving behavior. 

If you have the laptop plugged in, and/or set to something like high-performance power mode, does the problem go away?

I'm really short on good ideas for this one. 

[pmoniz]

Jeromie, I think you touched an important matter. The power-saving... It could be related. However, I have my battery on "Perfomance", same on BIOS. Do you have any way to check the power question?

[pmoniz]

Jeromie, please note this

https://i.gyazo.com/ba42568b3f24d9bfedbb640ec97e0b89.png

Notice the flash plugin. It is locked on Energy reduction. Are we (you) reaching something here?

[jeromiec83223024]

Yeah, I think we're on the right track.  I don't have a comparable machine with that nVidia control panel, so you'll have to play around.  If you can figure out how to get Flash and the Browser running with battery saving disabled, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts working right.

[pmoniz]

Do you think so? Well.. One thing is certain, That JW Player always crashes after I suspend my laptop... I don't know if it has something to do with it, with power-saving... Sometimes videos get stuck right after I go from one tab to another, and never when I'm on the same tab (unless the tab is opened after many others are open). So, When I go from youtube to facebook's chat, maybe the youtube's tab or the video itself "rests", and when I go back to it, it just stucks... Or in especial cases, crash.

Does this make sense?

(btw, its an AMD R7 I came across some individuals with this problem using an AMD...)

[pmoniz]

Jeromie, do you happen to know where this flashplayerplugin is?

https://i.gyazo.com/d30bd4949c070c32108db4fbbcb4dbe6.png

[Carm01]

If you are referring to the plugin for FireFox, it is here:

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/latest/help/install_flash_player.exe

Also , is you Operating system 32 or 64 bit?

[pmoniz]

Hello Carm! Thank you so much for your intervention!

The question about where the plugin is, I am asking for the folder where that specific exe is. Where is that flashplayerplugin_21_0_0_213.exe ?

My system is a 64 bit

[Carm01]

it lives here:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash

[pmoniz]

aahhhhh, almost!!

But the name is not right, on the folder you mentioned is FlashUtil_ActiveX.exe

It's not the same stated on Catalyst

[Carm01]

[Carm01]

Why don't you uninstall that version of Firefox as it is 32 bit and download a 64 bit version of Firefox

The way flash is handled in the 64 bit version is far resistant to crashing to be honest. I have been using Firefox flash crash free for a few years now.

Make sure you install that flash plugin as well, if you don't see some of the stuff in my previous screenshot in your folder then you must install it.

That should help with the crashing