Flash videos (like youtube) do not play right / stuttering

[smeezekitty]

I am not sure if this is exactly where to place this thread.

I am having problems with flash video playback recently. On many youtube videos,
it will play for 10-20 seconds and then the video and time counter will freeze and the audio will jump back 1-6 seconds. The video will resume as soon as the audio catches up to the point of freeze.

It will only happen one time per video but it starting to get annoying. Another thing is that videos and games are both stuttering where they used to be smooth.

I even tried yanking my GPU out and using the intel graphics just in case it was a GPU or driver problem but it still continued to do the same thing with the looped audio, video freeze and stuttering. I must say that the image quality between the GPU with DVI vs the onboard with VGA is like a night and day difference

Don't really know what to do at this point. Everything used to be pretty smooth and now its not.


Specs:

Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit
Mushkin 1066MHz 4 GB RAM (2 x 2)
Asrock G41M-S3
Corsair CX430
Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66GHz (stock)
AMD Radeon 6670 (stock)

Firefox 24.0
Flash player 11.9 (latest)

The same videos play through perfectly on my laptop

 

[kenrivers]

You might want to try clearing Flash Player's memory cache - http/www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html
http/forums.adobe.com/message/4278569
http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji-0xY9zU1Q

You could also try CCleaner (http/www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download) to clean out temporary Internet files. The free version will work just fine.

 

[smeezekitty]

I cleared the flash cache. I will update after I try it

 

[smeezekitty]

It is still doing it. Maybe not as bad but still there

edit: added video of weirdness http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixd61XJzQU0&feature=youtu.be

 

[kenrivers]

I watched enough of the video to see what you are talking about. At best it was a bit "jerky" and not smooth at all. I saw the bit where it freezes. Do you clean out temporary Internet files on a regular basis (not talking about the Flash cache)? I see that games and other videos are stuttering as well. Have you checked your RAM and CPU usage when this is happening? Just wondering if something is running the background that is hogging resources.

 

[smeezekitty]

Thanks for responding. I cleared the browser cache but again no improvement

Task manager shot: http/postimg.org/image/3txl3t82x/
The dips with the red arrows correspond with the freeze and audio jump.


You cannot really judge the smoothness from the video because the recording software drags the framerate way down with all the disk writes

 

[kenrivers]

What do you see if you click on the Resource Monitor? I noticed beside Free the number is 3. That seems a bit low. When you look under Processes (under Resource Monitor) do you anything that appears to be using a high amount of memory?

 

[smeezekitty]

What do you see if you click on the Resource Monitor? I noticed beside Free the number is 3. That seems a bit low. When you look under Processes (under Resource Monitor) do you anything that appears to be using a high amount of memory?

http/postimg.org/image/5uz795r8f/

Just firefox really. Most of the "non-free" memory is used as a disk cache

 

[kenrivers]

I will have to dig a little deeper to see if I can come up with anything. I'll get back to you later, right now it's time get some sleep.

 

[smeezekitty]

Seems some others having the same problem:
http/www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1ldqnx/bug_video_freezes_and_audio_jumps_back_a_few/ (I know reddit)
http/productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/UOTSzjHFO-w

 

[kenrivers]

Seems some others having the same problem:
http/www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1ldqnx/bug_video_freezes_and_audio_jumps_back_a_few/ (I know reddit)
http/productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/UOTSzjHFO-w

I took a look at both of those links and there seem to be quite a few frustrated people. I don't know what to tell you but will continue to research the issue and will let you know if I find a solution.

 

[rfxcasey]

Make sure nothing is downloading in the background. I had an issue with videos lagging while downloading via Steam. I have a 30 MB download speed from my ISP and Steam servers will server up some really high bandwidth for you downloads. I had to cap my download speed in Steam to 5 MB per second and the problem went away. Large files still download extremely fast at between 3 and 5 MB per second.

 

[smeezekitty]

Make sure nothing is downloading in the background. I had an issue with videos lagging while downloading via Steam. I have a 30 MB download speed from my ISP and Steam servers will server up some really high bandwidth for you downloads. I had to cap my download speed in Steam to 5 MB per second and the problem went away. Large files still download extremely fast at between 3 and 5 MB per second.

Well, this is a year old post.

This problem has resolved itself somehow. Although video playback is still "jerky"
for some reason. I think it might have to do with high DPC latency

 

[Josafat Guerrero]

Disable hardware acceleration.

 

[mtncat]

Was able to fix this in Windows 7 64bit, at least, by deleting the contents of Windows>SysWOW64>Macromed>Flash.

When deleting I was prompted that I needed to have Admin rights, and one file in the directory wouldn't delete, but after doing so, the stuttering of youtube (especially while browsing when playing videos) stopped.

Hope this helps someone.

 

[Josafat Guerrero]

Make sure nothing is downloading in the background. I had an issue with videos lagging while downloading via Steam. I have a 30 MB download speed from my ISP and Steam servers will server up some really high bandwidth for you downloads. I had to cap my download speed in Steam to 5 MB per second and the problem went away. Large files still download extremely fast at between 3 and 5 MB per second.

Well, this is a year old post.

This problem has resolved itself somehow. Although video playback is still "jerky"
for some reason. I think it might have to do with high DPC latency

Seriously, disable hardware acceleration in chrome settings. It's hidden under advanced settings, but you can just search for it.

 

[rfxcasey]

Thanks for the advice, I'll try out the hardware acceleration first when I get home after work in the morning. If that doesn't help I'll look into deleting/moving the contents of the Flash folder.

 

[sashamalchik]

Seriously, disable hardware acceleration in chrome settings. It's hidden under advanced settings, but you can just search for it.

Facebook auto-playing videos were stuttering on Chrome. Disabling hardware acceleration worked perfectly.

 

[spazonymous]

This is a known Firefox issue with Flash protected mode. The solution is to disable "protected mode" in Firefox. This is the advice you will find on the Mozilla support site.

To disable protected mode do the following in Firefox:

Type about:config in the address bar.
Search for "dom.ipc.plugins.flash.disable-protected-mode" and change its value to "true".
Restart Firefox.

This solution works 100% and completely solves stuttering Flash video in Firefox (when the same videos work fine in other browsers). It's more likely to be a problem on laptops with integrated graphics (that's what I found anyway). PCs with powerful graphics cards probably won't see this problem ever.

Edit: It should be noted that the advice posted by others in this thread to "disable hardware acceleration" is not good advice. Hardware acceleration should be left on, you want hardware acceleration, it uses less power and is more efficient than software.

 

[HugoJJ]

Seriously, disable hardware acceleration in chrome settings. It's hidden under advanced settings, but you can just search for it.

Facebook auto-playing videos were stuttering on Chrome. Disabling hardware acceleration worked perfectly.

I had the same issue, disabling hardware acceleration definitely resolved it.