Video Playback Issues

[magnaphantasia]

Captchas

• I have read the instructions.
• I have searched existing issues and avoided creating duplicates.
• I am not filing an enhancement request.

What happened?

I've been having trouble playing videos on my other monitor while doing a heavy GPU/CPU bound task (heavy gaming/photoshop rendering/etc.), that every time the Zen window is out of focus the video just freezes and the audio continues along. This has been a long-standing Firefox issue until it was fixed at some point. Issue does not persist in other forks/projects like Floorp or Waterfox, which I find odd. This only seems to be happening in Zen for the time being, and it appears to be a primarily NVIDIA issue. I've never had this issue when rendering video on AMD graphics cards, but I digress. This also doesn't happen on any Chromium-based browser I've used either.

I enabled/disabled a few settings in about:config to try and rectify the issue, and these are the ones I adjusted:

• gfx.webrender.compositor = false
• widget.windows.window_occlusion_tracking.enabled = false
• accessibility.force_disabled = 0 -> 1

These "fixes" were all sourced from various places, but when I turned the occlusion_tracking off in conjunction with these settings, the video playback continued even under a heavy gaming/rendering load.

That's all I really got for this one. Further research shows this has been a chronic issue through Firefox versions as well.

It also is not able to be replicated in safe mode for some reason, but I really don't understand what it could be given the install I have was fresh with a few addons like uBlock which I thought was responsible (it's not).

Reproducible?

• I have checked that this issue cannot be reproduced on Mozilla Firefox. (for now)

Version

1.9t/1.9b

What platform are you seeing the problem on?

Windows

Relevant log output if applicable

[magnaphantasia]

Running a video in a popout player makes the video not seem to freeze when in a full screen app like a game, or rendering something heavy graphics-wise. Tested on Youtube/Twitch.tv.

[Anthonyy232]

Can confirm

[magnaphantasia]

So I've narrowed down the culprit. HAGS (Hardware Accelerated Graphics Scheduling) does not play nice with hardware acceleration on the browser. But disabling just the normal hardware acceleration leads to such pitiful performance (when this didn't occur on my AMD card prior), I dug even further.

It turns out that it seems to be an NVIDIA issue at the core. A setting that only targets single monitors for hardware acceleration instead of making it display-wide (multiple monitors). You can find the setting here with Orbmu2k's NVIDIA Profile Inspector:

Which is set to "Single display performance" by default and causes a wealth of issues rendering on the other monitor. Just about any video content stutters on any website when acceleration is on, and insufferably laggy when it's disabled like it's running at 5 FPS and causes the entire browser to sag.

I confirmed it was a pretty common NVIDIA issue with multiple sources, but no certain fix seems to exist except turning off HAGS or swapping this setting. I haven't tested multi-monitor video rendering with HAGS on while playing a game under load, but we'll see if that holds up or not. My processor should be able to render this stuff along side the GPU, but it doesn't seem to want to with hardware acceleration off in the browser both on Chromium and Firefox. But strangely in safe mode, it seems to work fine.

Pretty big head scratcher the thing. It seems to be NVIDIA and Windows related. After finding all of this I'm pretty hesitant to blame the browser, unless they're all not prioritizing CPU rendering for some reason when HWA is ticked off in the settings.

That's all I got really. Hope this helps someone.

[Heimdall-One]

I got the same issue. But its only occuring with Zen at this intensity.

[Crappey]

This happens all the time for me on Zen and less frequently on other Firefox browsers. I've tested on other Chromium browsers (arc, edge, chrome) and it never happens. Seems to be a fairly common Firefox issue after googling it.

[zen-browser-auto]

Closing this issue as part of a repo cleanup

Due to technical-debt we had in the past, we are currently clearing out old, duplicate, stale, and non-actionable issues to improve issue tracking and make it easier to focus on fixing real bugs.

If this issue is still relevant, please open a new issue using our updated issue template, which will help us categorize and address it more efficiently.

Thanks for your understanding and for helping us improve the project! 🚀

This issue can be reopened at: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/new?template=bug_report.yml&title=Video%20Playback%20Issues%0A