And this is 100% Youtube’s fault, not Firefox’s fault, they created this issue:

This problem is triggered by bad muxed VP9 bytestream served by Youtube, so it’s not a regression on our side, this issue can also be reproduced on old versions Firefox. Usually when muxing a video bytestream, the video samples’ timestamp should be monotonizally increasing and no overlap between samples. But there are some bad video samples in YT’s bytesteam, they overlapped with the previous sample. Eg. [124416000, 125126000] and [125125000, 131382000]. The next one should start from 12516000 instead of starting from 125125000 causing an overlapping.

That overlapped sample triggers this and our WebM demuxer fails to calculate the next timestamp in that situation. The end time of video sample was set to the same as the sample’s start time, and that causes a gap being detected for the next sample, resulting in resetting append state. When doing so, mNeedRandomAccessPoint would be set to true and that triggers the sample skipping mechanism per the spec.

Therefore, there would be many sample being incorrectly skipped and won’t be added into the buffered range. When entering the buffering state, Firefox would be waiting those sample which has been skipped but Youtube thought that those samples were already appended. That makes the endless buffering happened.

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1878510#c113 (Alastor Wu [:alwu])

60 points

This is probably related to Youtube starting to serve ads mixed into the actual videostream, right?

This causes issues of them fucking up the timestamps?

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34 points

Honestly might be part of it, by going out of spec on the timestamps it probably let’s them more easily insert different length ads

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6 points

Yep, 100% is what’s going on. Got to love modern day Google huh?

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38 points

oh, I’ve been wondering about this, as I’ve had occasional youtube-video just enter the infinite buffering. Oddly it has only happened on linux o_O

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14 points

I thought it was just my internet being poor

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7 points

youtube likes to offer me a little popup to explain why my speeds are slow and it’s never their fault! Only my browser and ISP are to blame, obviously.

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6 points

I was wondering the same although I’m on Windows.

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2 points

It’s been happening to me but more consistently in 1440p or 4k, 1080p will still do it but only after a few videos or SponsorBlock does it’s thing. Happened on Linux and Windows.

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5 points

I was so confused as to why my videos kept getting stuck, thought it was my internet acting up.

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1 point

It was a Firefox bug? I now use a user agent switcher only for YouTube and a testsite, and I could swear after choosing chrome that the buffering etc stopped. But I will try again in a few days without the switcher.

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1 point

I used the user agent switcher too and it helped for a bit, but started doing the same hitching and buffering not long after

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