Bug 2214267 - Broken H264 decoding since Firefox 114
Summary: Broken H264 decoding since Firefox 114
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: firefox
Version: 37
Hardware: x86_64
OS: Linux
unspecified
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Gecko Maintainer
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9362722/
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2023-06-12 12:36 UTC by Robert Vazan
Modified: 2023-07-19 08:44 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
Screencast demonstrating the issue (1.65 MB, video/webm)
2023-06-12 12:37 UTC, Robert Vazan
no flags Details
about:support (34.29 KB, text/plain)
2023-06-12 12:41 UTC, Robert Vazan
no flags Details
glxinfo > gfxlog.txt 2>&1 (53.32 KB, text/plain)
2023-06-12 12:42 UTC, Robert Vazan
no flags Details

Description Robert Vazan 2023-06-12 12:36:29 UTC
Upgrade to Firefox 114 broke H264 video decoding. Videos are now extremely jerky, jumping forth and back as if frames were reordered. Not all H264 videos are broken. For example, on IMDb, autoplaying trailers on movie homepage are broken, but clicking through to the dedicaded trailer page gives you smooth playback. YouTube videos are also all broken if they are in H264 format. Perhaps it has to do with the complexity of layout on and around the video.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
The most reliable way to reproduce the issue is to look at IMDb autoplay trailers on movie homepages.



Here's what I tried so far:

- Reverting to Firefox 113 fixes the issue, but that's obviously an impractical workaround.
- Wayland/X11 switch has no effect.
- Software/hardware WebRender switch has no effect.
- My HW does not support video decoding, but I disabled it for a while anyway and the change had no effect.
- Safe mode has no effect.
- Clean profile has no effect.

Diagnostic data and screencast are available.

Comment 1 Robert Vazan 2023-06-12 12:37:48 UTC
Created attachment 1970410 [details]
Screencast demonstrating the issue

Comment 2 Robert Vazan 2023-06-12 12:41:12 UTC
Created attachment 1970411 [details]
about:support

Comment 3 Robert Vazan 2023-06-12 12:42:12 UTC
Created attachment 1970416 [details]
glxinfo > gfxlog.txt 2>&1

Comment 4 Robert Vazan 2023-06-12 12:45:43 UTC
I will try to upgrade to F38, but seeing as this is related to upgrade of Firefox package, I suspect upgrade to F38 will not help.

Comment 5 Martin Stransky 2023-06-19 10:38:13 UTC
Can you try to install ffmpeg from rpmfusion?
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration for details.
Thanks.

Comment 6 Robert Vazan 2023-07-18 17:04:42 UTC
When HW acceleration is installed according to the instructions, there is no jitter. This fixes the problem for me. I still don't understand why would software video decoding fail so catastrophically. Isn't software decoding meant to be the safe fallback?

Comment 7 Martin Stransky 2023-07-19 08:44:16 UTC
(In reply to Robert Vazan from comment #6)
> When HW acceleration is installed according to the instructions, there is no
> jitter. This fixes the problem for me. I still don't understand why would
> software video decoding fail so catastrophically. Isn't software decoding
> meant to be the safe fallback?

Unless it's OpenH264 meant for WebRTC only.


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