Youtube and Youtube Music seeking in Media player is not synced

[Leblayd]

Captchas

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

What happened?

The new Media player controller works fine on Spotify, for example, but it has minor issues on:

Youtube Music:
I can click to seek in the music without problem. But the issue is that it is not shown either in the seekbar or the time. And even after that, it jumps back to the place before seeking when I pause and unpause, and when I mute and unmute it.
Also, it did work out one time where it randomly fixed itself after a 5 second delay.

Youtube
When seeking, it takes a second or two to actually load and buffer the video and resume playing. However, the seekbar and timer thinks it's immediately playing, desyncing the two.
Pause and resume fixes this consistently.
I assume this problem exists with every service, it just isn't visible with music for its sheer speed.

(In addition I think the seekbar's hitbox is insanely small. It literally seems like 1 pixel. But I'm aware this is an entirely separate issue)

Reproducible?

• I have checked that this issue cannot be reproduced on Mozilla Firefox.

Version

1.10b

What platform are you seeing the problem on?

Linux (Flatpak)

Relevant log output if applicable

[Slowlife01]

Since the API we use is event-based, the current position is only updated when specific events are triggered. Even during buffering, it still reports a playing state. Unless we change the underlying API, this behavior will persist.
Edit: I might have found a workaround

I’m not entirely clear on the issue you’re experiencing with YouTube Music. Could you share a video?

[Slowlife01]

Here is a video of the issue:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VshaFvWu-UkiJ88qtbL4_iobSNhuvVmT/view?usp=sharing

Timestamps to check out:

0:06 - Switches to youtube music tab because of the dialogue box 1:07 - Switches to youtube music tab because of the dialogue box 3:10 - Music stops playing after sometime when dialogue box is ignored

What do you suggest as a workaround to this issue?

Oh, you can disable tab unloader or pin the tab for now. This is fixed in the next update

[Leblayd]

@Slowlife01 What I'm describing is a completely different issue from what @eduardozampronio sent.
(I do experience that as well. I just didn't mention it because they already created their own issue: #6648)

So, here you go. Unfortunately no sound, so I want to be clear that the sound is 100% correct, just the Zen seekbar isn't:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ic0WTOC6xRnK-kcB5bHXwk3d2xcnzRTB/view?usp=sharing

[logicsec]

Can confirm this issue. Scrubbing back to the start of a song and the elapsed time will stay where it was. Below was after I scrubbed back to the start of the song and the start is playing. After an update event runs, it will reset itself to the correct timestamp.

[Slowlife01]

I can't seem to reproduce it. What if you drag and drop it?

[logicsec]

Thats what I had done. Let me see if I can capture a recording with that audio.

RAgPXcbIQf.mp4

[logicsec]

Version showing yt music and the media player time desync

aAdT7c4kxU.mp4

[eduardozampronio]

@Slowlife01 What I'm describing is a completely different issue from what @eduardozampronio sent. (I do experience that as well. I just didn't mention it because they already created their own issue: #6648)

So, here you go. Unfortunately no sound, so I want to be clear that the sound is 100% correct, just the Zen seekbar isn't: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ic0WTOC6xRnK-kcB5bHXwk3d2xcnzRTB/view?usp=sharing

sry i posted here by mistake

[mauro-balades]

Could someone please give it a try on twilight?

@Slowlife01 this seems to be an issue with YouTube music not emitting the correct position rather than Zen's. I've seen people have the same issue with their native OS media players with YouTube

[Leblayd]

Could someone please give it a try on twilight?

@Slowlife01 this seems to be an issue with YouTube music not emitting the correct position rather than Zen's. I've seen people have the same issue with their native OS media players with YouTube

I can say this definitely doesn't happen for me with the Media Controls Gnome extension, so I don't think it's fully YT Music's fault.

[Slowlife01]

Could you check if Twilight fixed it?

[Leblayd]

I tried both Twilight and today's release, and it didn't help.
Neither of the two problems are fixed.

Not sure if I did it right, tough. I downloaded the Twilight .AppImage from the website, not from github. Because it seems like the twilight tag is far behind the latest release.
What I downloaded has Build ID 20250325070248 in about:support, so I think that should be it, but correct me if I'm wrong.

[mantzu132]

https://imgur.com/NjPTNWa Same issue, windows, have had it since the release of the media player.

When I'm seeking back (e.g going from 1:00 to 0:30) it seeks to 0:30 and jumps back to 1:00.
If I'm seeking forward (e.g going from 1:00 to 1:30) it will seek to 1:30 and sometimes go back to 1:00 sometimes some other time.
I've also had it behave normally, sometimes it does jump to where it's actually supposed to be after seeking.

Also not sure whether it was a miss-click , but when seeking forward I had it change the song?

Overall it's really buggy with YouTube music. Works perfectly as far as I can remember on YouTube, though.

[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=Youtube%20and%20Youtube%20Music%20seeking%20in%20Media%20player%20is%20not%20synced%0A