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General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: BrianHG on November 04, 2021, 02:58:48 am

Title: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: BrianHG on November 04, 2021, 02:58:48 am
Has anyone else seen this?

     I just updated my Firefox to the latest 91.3.0esr (64-bit) and now Youtube keeps on lowering my 480p res to 360p randomly in the middle of watching a video.

     Is there a way to down-grade / roll back the current update to my previous version of Firefox?

     Yesterday, everything was fine.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: JPortici on November 04, 2021, 05:47:24 am
given that i'm currently on 93.0 and it's downloading an update... update?
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: BrianHG on November 04, 2021, 05:52:42 am
 :palm:  It gets worse.  Now when I change the volume in the Youtube player, they no longer edit 'Mozilla FireFox's volume in the system Volume Mixer.  Instead, they are manipulating the waveform internally, then sending that home-made volumed audio to the system with a full volume level setting for their task screwing up the OS's internal volume equalization function I have enabled.  As I lower the playback volume in youtube, the OS fights back boosting the audio to keep the one level.

     I don't get it.  What was wrong with originally setting Mozilla FireFox's volume?
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: BrianHG on November 04, 2021, 05:53:42 am
given that i'm currently on 93.0 and it's downloading an update... update?

That the latest on with all the added garbage.  I want to go back to the simpler one with the smaller tabs, less system resources and proper volume controls so I don't blast my head.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: I wanted a rude username on November 04, 2021, 06:30:58 am
Just upgraded, and YouTube is working same as always (including it forgets who I am every time I close the tab and Cookie AutoDelete (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/) kicks in).

I recall the audio setting being as you describe (on the application level) many years ago, but figured they would have stopped doing that once video streaming became common, since it wouldn't allow you to have per-tab volume settings. Can confirm it's per-tab for me.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: BrianHG on November 07, 2021, 03:14:02 am
LOL, I run a video at 1080p, then around every 2-5 minutes, it drops in quality by 1 notch at a time.  Its like it trying to insert a commercial at that specific time, but it fails to do so.  It then ends up re-buffering that section of the video while dropping to a lower quality.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: NiHaoMike on November 07, 2021, 05:11:45 am
Just download the video with youtube-dl and play it with VLC or mpv. If you have a good GPU, mpv can take advantage of it for really good upscaling.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: SiliconWizard on November 07, 2021, 09:07:16 pm
LOL, I run a video at 1080p, then around every 2-5 minutes, it drops in quality by 1 notch at a time.  Its like it trying to insert a commercial at that specific time, but it fails to do so.  It then ends up re-buffering that section of the video while dropping to a lower quality.

If you have any kind of ad blocker that may be the reason. I have both AdBlock+ and the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension, and I never get any commercial in YT videos. I haven't noticed it had an impact on resolution though. At least in my case, resolution dropping is usually the consequence of my internet connection getting slower throughput. Some ISPs also do some kind of automatic throttling based on time of day and IPs - in particular for streaming web services - to avoid saturation.
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: BrianHG on November 08, 2021, 02:30:06 am
LOL, I run a video at 1080p, then around every 2-5 minutes, it drops in quality by 1 notch at a time.  Its like it trying to insert a commercial at that specific time, but it fails to do so.  It then ends up re-buffering that section of the video while dropping to a lower quality.

If you have any kind of ad blocker that may be the reason. I have both AdBlock+ and the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension, and I never get any commercial in YT videos. I haven't noticed it had an impact on resolution though. At least in my case, resolution dropping is usually the consequence of my internet connection getting slower throughput. Some ISPs also do some kind of automatic throttling based on time of day and IPs - in particular for streaming web services - to avoid saturation.

Enhancer for YouTube, that's cheating.  It also slows down Firefox's other panels' windows smooth refresh and scrolling once installed.  It also eats up an extra additional 200 or so megabytes of system memory and 10-20% cpu once a youtube window is opened, but the video is paused.

Once installed, I can no longer read EEVBlog when scrolling the screen.  The display refresh jumps similar to my old 50MHz Amiga in a text editor even though EEVBlog is like 99% text.  It's like going from 60fps to ~12fps.


Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: harerod on November 08, 2021, 04:47:20 pm
Ah, yet another nuisance in a growing list of reasons why I see myself using Edge more and more. I wonder if I may chime in here or if I should start a new thread? Recommendations as to where?

As for downgrade:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-older-version-firefox?redirectslug=install-older-version-of-firefox&redirectlocale=en-US (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-older-version-firefox?redirectslug=install-older-version-of-firefox&redirectlocale=en-US)
Edit: just did this. Select the latest version that you are comfortable with and earn bad karma for running an outdated browser.


Annoying things on Win7 and Win10:
- the whole "themes" thingy with larger rounded tabs that take more screen real estate, while keeping the actual text size
- the back-function doesn't jump back to the exact last position. Kind of breaks my simple HTML5/CSS-based pages. Example:
https://harerod.de/lbr/nihon1809/nihon1809.html#181015 (https://harerod.de/lbr/nihon1809/nihon1809.html#181015)
Work in progress, sorry for German. Just click a picture and hit the browser's "go back"-function.

Edit: 94.0.1 (rabid release) doesn't show the back-problem. For the time being, I'll ride that train and will check for improvements in ESR later.




Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: thm_w on November 08, 2021, 11:49:57 pm
Enhancer for YouTube, that's cheating.  It also slows down Firefox's other panels' windows smooth refresh and scrolling once installed.  It also eats up an extra additional 200 or so megabytes of system memory and 10-20% cpu once a youtube window is opened, but the video is paused.

Once installed, I can no longer read EEVBlog when scrolling the screen.  The display refresh jumps similar to my old 50MHz Amiga in a text editor even though EEVBlog is like 99% text.  It's like going from 60fps to ~12fps.

It does seem to use 100-200mb memory but I don't see the CPU problem, maybe turn off all the overlay controls?
How much memory do you have?
Title: Re: Firefox update to 91.3.0esr (64-bit) now keeps on lowering Youtube res to 360p.
Post by: SiliconWizard on November 09, 2021, 12:30:01 am
LOL, I run a video at 1080p, then around every 2-5 minutes, it drops in quality by 1 notch at a time.  Its like it trying to insert a commercial at that specific time, but it fails to do so.  It then ends up re-buffering that section of the video while dropping to a lower quality.

If you have any kind of ad blocker that may be the reason. I have both AdBlock+ and the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension, and I never get any commercial in YT videos. I haven't noticed it had an impact on resolution though. At least in my case, resolution dropping is usually the consequence of my internet connection getting slower throughput. Some ISPs also do some kind of automatic throttling based on time of day and IPs - in particular for streaming web services - to avoid saturation.

Enhancer for YouTube, that's cheating.  It also slows down Firefox's other panels' windows smooth refresh and scrolling once installed.  It also eats up an extra additional 200 or so megabytes of system memory and 10-20% cpu once a youtube window is opened, but the video is paused.

Once installed, I can no longer read EEVBlog when scrolling the screen.  The display refresh jumps similar to my old 50MHz Amiga in a text editor even though EEVBlog is like 99% text.  It's like going from 60fps to ~12fps.

Cheating? ::)

Anyway, I've never noticed any issue whatsoever with it here. It may eat up that much memory but frankly I can hardly notice - Firefox already gobbles up GBytes of memory when used with many tabs open, so... (not saying this is good but just how it is and my machines have from 16 GB to 64 GB of RAM.)