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pmoniz
Participating Frequently
April 8, 2016
Question

Sometimes, videos on Youtube/Facebook/others load/buffer but won't play. Tried everything...

  • April 8, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 4954 views

Hi everybody,

I have this problem for months already. I just don't know what else to do. If I have a game opened on a browser (chrome, mozilla, ...) and 1 video or facebook opened, the videos might crash, freeze or not play if I go from on tab to another. Sometimes I just press pause, watch tv for 5 seconds, when I press "play" is freezes or crashes. I think everything goes OK if I just have one tab opened watching a video, but If I have 2 or 3 tabs opened, this happenes. A lot of times I open a video on youtube, it loads the video and just won't play... I have to press F5 a lot of times until it starts playing and sometimes it just won't and I have to quit the video or close tabs

I tried so many things I even can't remember: disable hardware aceleration, update and/or downgrade drivers, uninstall Flash from the OS and keep the Flash of the browser (Chrome), Change the AMD configuration, searched for virus and malwares, run CCleaner, etc etc etc.

This is so frustrating, it really is... I don't know who else to ask for help, I searched everywhere on the internet and few have this problem and most of them solve it by disabling hardware aceleration. But mine keeps happening this problem. It happens with all browsers, with any type of videos: stream, youtube, facebook, etc.

Any sugestion would be really appreciated. Please help!

My best regards!

ADDICIONAL INFO:

- Windows 8.1

- Intel® Core™ i7-4510U with Intel® Turbo Boost

- AMD Radeon™ R7 M260

- 8GB RAM

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    1 reply

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    April 12, 2016

    Make sure you have the latest graphics drivers installed.

    Keep in mind that browser tabs consume resources.  Chrome will show the Flash crash dialog when the system runs out of memory.  If you have a complex game and a bunch of tabs running, that's not out of the realm of possibility.   In general, if that happens, it will take down all the Flash instances across all tabs.

    P
    pmonizAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    April 13, 2016

    Hello Jeromie,

    Thank you so much for your attention and reply.

    Like I mentioned in my inicial post, I did have the latest graphic drivers installed. I tried the latest on Toshiba and I tried the latest on AMD's official site, none of them did work, the problem mantains exactly the same.

    Regarding the tab consuming. Well, even If I have 5, 6 or more open tabs with videos on each one of them, the RAM consumption is far from being saturated, it does not even consume half my 8GB RAM, so I really don't think that's the matter.

    However, I did find something very important. I tried disabling the hardware acceleration on Google Chrome and it never solved the problem. But, 2 days ago, I tried disabling the same but on Firefox and It did not stuck or show any of the symptoms! That is a huge step.... However, I had to install Flash on Windows because it was not integrated on Firefox like it is on Chrome. So, what is going on here? Where is the issue? (1) Is it on the Graphic AMD Radeon R7? (2) Is it on Chrome's integrated Flash? (3) Is it on Chrome's build not allowing to fully disable hardware acceleation? (4) Is it because Chrome has a specific kind of memory usage?

    I found another person with the EXACT same symptoms and she also has an AMD Radeon R7. That can't be a coincidence... So, I trongly believe the issue is the (1). However, I don't think (2) can be discarded, since I never had any problems running videos on Windows movie players. The problem can be circumvented by disabling the hardware acceleration, like in Firefox, but doing that on Chrome maintains the issues so I believe (3) is also happening. Finally, (4) could also happen at the same time as the other (1), (2) and (3) as a concomitant problem.

    Once again, thank you for your reply Jeromie and I'm so sorry for the long post!

    My best regards

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    April 13, 2016

    You can also exhaust GPU memory, and now that the browsers are hardware accelerated in addition to Flash, that puts more memory pressure on the graphics cards, but I'm not sure how you'd monitor that.  We *will* throw an out of memory condition if you exhaust GPU memory as well.

    Flash Player in Chrome is a built-in component.  It's completely encapsulated, including settings.  The Chrome sandbox prevents that Flash Player instance from knowing about our accessing the shared resources used by the other Flash instances on the system.  This is great for security, but confusing if you're using multiple browsers regularly.

    Anyway, you've disabled hardware acceleration in the NPAPI Flash Player that's used by Firefox, and your problem went away.  We know that if you don't use the GPU, you're good.  You could follow the same steps in Chrome to disable hardware acceleration there.  If performance is acceptable for you in that config, that's a totally viable workaround.

    I don't have a good way to differentiate, but it seems like there are a couple possibilities:

    1. There's a latent bug in the graphics driver that you're hitting, and it's not patched yet. 

    2. You're exhausting the available GPU memory.

      1. For this one, if you're just running a bunch of browser tabs and you never hit this, but when you do something else GPU intensive, like running a 3D game, while doing the same thing, and you're hitting either the grey exclamation mark in Flash or a crashed plugin in Chrome, you probably have your answer.

      2. It's possible that I'm totally wrong.  If you're getting this in Firefox and you're getting a crash notification and not just the Grey exclamation point, I'd be really interested in seeing the crash log.  You can get it by going to about:crashes and submitting the link that corresponds with the time of the crash.  You can just copy and paste the address of the window that opens up in a reply here.  You don't need to wait for the processing message to complete.  It will happen in the background, even if you close the window.
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