Mp4 Playback Choppy In Firefox Since Downloading New Build of ffmpeg

[Bruce Wayne]

I was enjoying beautifully smooth MP4 playback, regardless of the resolution, in Firefox's native player. I had been having problems (slowness, jerkiness, freezing) with it but then uninstalled the VLC Web Plugin and voila, everything was fine. Then today, someone advised me I could make really high quality animated gifs with ffmpeg. As ffmpeg's a command line tool, I went about looking for a GUI and found Avanti. But I then had problems using Avanti because of a missing codec. Somebody else advised me to download a new ffmpeg build, the latest one recommended for the latest usable version of Avanti. So I did. But then when I tried opening an MP4 in Firefox, I got really choppy playback again. Can someone please tell me what I did wrong and how to fix it?

[poisondeathray]

ffmpeg.exe has nothing to do with firefox. It's never called or used by firefox.

Check task manager and see if you have some other processes (that shouldn't be) still running. Check your CPU usage. For example, if you are concurrently encoding with ffmpeg, it might be eating up all your CPU cycles, and if you are using CPU for browser playback, it might drop frames

[Bruce Wayne]

ffmpeg.exe has nothing to do with firefox. It's never called or used by firefox.

Check task manager and see if you have some other processes (that shouldn't be) still running. Check your CPU usage. For example, if you are concurrently encoding with ffmpeg, it might be eating up all your CPU cycles, and if you are using CPU for browser playback, it might drop frames

Thanks. At least I don't have to worry about that. I'm certainly not encoding anything at the moment, and I can't see any processes that shouldn't be running at first glance. But is there any way I can get Task Manager to save a text file of what's running so I can post it here?

EDIT: I still have Task Manager open and it says my CPU is fluctuating from 3% to the 40s. Every time I close and reopen Task Manager, it says my CPU is at 100%.

[poisondeathray]

You shouldn't need to post anything. If you are idle , not doing anything, the CPU usage should be low. Then you're done with that line of thinking. But if it's not, then sort the processes by CPU usage and look at what the processes are and report back or post a screenshot

Sometimes background processes can eat up cycles, such as scheduled virus/malware scans, scheduled disk optimiation/defragmentation scans etc... If your computer isn't fast enough, they can negatively affect playback

[poisondeathray]

EDIT: I still have Task Manager open and it says my CPU is fluctuating from 3% to the 40s. Every time I close and reopen Task Manager, it says my CPU is at 100%.

A brief blip is fine, but you're looking for sustained CPU usage. Sort highest to lowest and watch for a while, see what processes are using the most

Also , are your listed computer specs in your profile up to date ? That could explain many of your problems in terms of playback choppiness

[Bruce Wayne]

EDIT: I still have Task Manager open and it says my CPU is fluctuating from 3% to the 40s. Every time I close and reopen Task Manager, it says my CPU is at 100%.

A brief blip is fine, but you're looking for sustained CPU usage. Sort highest to lowest and watch for a while, see what processes are using the most

Also , are your listed computer specs in your profile up to date ? That could explain many of your problems in terms of playback choppiness

Here are my most up-to-date specs.

OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 64-bit

CPU Intel Celeron N2830 @ 2.16GHz Bay Trail-M 22nm Technology (@45 degrees C)

RAM 4.00GB DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)

Motherboard Acer Aspire ES1-511 (CPU 1)

Graphics Generic PnP Monitor (1366x768@60Hz) Intel HD Graphics (Acer Incorporated [ALI])

Storage 465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000LPVX-22V0TT0 (SATA) (currently about 35 GB of unused space) (@30 degrees C)

Optical Drives HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GUA0N

Audio Realtek High Definition Audio

EDIT: My CPU usage is generally very low. Usually in the single digits. It's fluctuating only up to the low teens or low 20s. The processes that hit the top of the list when these fluctuations happen are Firefox itself, which eats up about a half a GB of memory, Task Manager itself, WMI Provider Host, and sometimes one of the Service Host: Local System processes.

[Bruce Wayne]

Something else I just noticed. I tried opening an MP4 in a new tab and put it on continuous loop using the Media Loop plugin for Firefox, watched it play jerkily a few times, then closed the tab but the audio didn't stop immediately. The tab was closed, the video wasn't playing, but the audio didn't stop until a few loops later.

[poisondeathray]

It's an entry level notebook processor, with a relatively low amount of memory. I suspect many of your problems in your threads the last few days are related to that. A faster processor will be able to overcome slight problems, slightly less optimized players or browsers

Are you sure this video played back smoothly before? Because a full HD video probably won't playback smoothly on that computer with pure CPU decoding, even with an optimized video player (and browser players are very poor in comparison)

I asked you before, but are you sure you don't have any 3rd party extensions/plugins installed that might be interfering ?

[Bruce Wayne]

It's an entry level notebook processor, with a relatively low amount of memory. I suspect many of your problems in your threads the last few days are related to that. A faster processor will be able to overcome slight problems, slightly less optimized players or browsers

Are you sure this video played back smoothly before? Because a full HD video probably won't playback smoothly on that computer with pure CPU decoding, even with an optimized video player (and browser players are very poor in comparison)

I asked you before, but are you sure you don't have any 3rd party extensions/plugins installed that might be interfering ?

You asked me that in another thread? Sorry, I don't remember. I'm assuming you mean extensions/plugins in Firefox. Here's a list of the ones I have. I wouldn't know which ones might or might not cause trouble. (And yes, I had been able to play several full 1080 mp4s in Firefox natively with perfect smoothness this weekend since I uninstalled VLC Web Plugin. But suddenly today, I'm having problems again.)

Extensions
Adblock Plus
Avast Online Security
Avast SafePrice
FlashGot (enables downloads of videos from web pages)
Ghostery
Greasemonkey
InlineDisposition (forces a browser to open compatible file types rather than asking the user what to do with them)
Media Loop (adds a loop command to the menu that appears when you right-click an MP4/OGV/WebM in Firefox)
ReloadEvery (when enabled, forces a page reload every set number of seconds or minutes)
Unhide Passwords (enables you to type in passwords that you can see rather than little dots)

Plugins
Adobe Acrobat
DivX Plus Web Player
DivX VOD Helper Plug-in
Foxit Reader Plugin for Mozilla
Google Earth Plugin
Google Update
iTunes Application Detector
OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Osmozilla - GPAC Plugin for Mozilla
Primetime Content Decryption Module provided by Adobe Systems, Incorporated
QuickTime Plug-in 7.7.9
RealPlayer Version Plugin 6.0.12.46
RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit)
Shockwave Flash
Shockwave for Director
Silverlight Plug-In

All my extensions are enabled. All my plugins are on Always Activate.

[Bruce Wayne]

Oh GOD, this is so FRUSTRATING! I just tried disabling ALL my extensions and ALL my plugins to see if I could pin down the problem to one of them, but even with EVERYTHING disabled, I STILL got intensely jerky, slow-mo playback from an MP4. An MP4 that just YESTERDAY could play just as well in Firefox as it can in a media player.

[Bruce Wayne]

PROBLEM SOLVED! It was hardware acceleration. I'd turned it off. I tried turning it back on again but no effect. But then I closed and restarted Firefox, opened up an MP4, and it played perfectly. So it's to do with hardware acceleration. If that's turned off, on a machine like mine at least, videos will play choppily, in slow-mo, and freeze a lot. I'm now gonna try reinstalling VLC Web Plugin to see if that had actually been having any effect or if it was all to do with hardware acceleration.

EDIT: It had nothing to do with the VLC Web Plugin. I just need to keep hardware acceleration on.