Youtube in Firefox lagging, skipping, dropping frames, consuming all CPU

Ask Fedora
1

Can someone explain what’s going on with Fedora KDE (regular, not Atomic) and Youtube playback (or any other video streaming for that matter) where it’s just entirely unplayable, skipping, pausing, dropping frames and CPU basically being stuffed 100% on RDD Process.

I’ve been using Ubuntu prior this and never had issues with video playback. But I’ve always wanted to use Fedora and I’ve had these problems. I’ve tried a lot of things I found online and nothing helped. I’ve tried disabling RDD settings in Firefox, with no change. I’ve tried Flatpak version of Firefox and also RPM version from Fedora. No change. This is running on Intel Pentium N6000 notebook. It’s nothing special, low end quad core, but it can basically play 4K video no problem and it’s fast enough for all multimedia needs. Just not in Fedora for some reason. To do sanity check I’ve installed Kubuntu again and it plays all video in Firefox no problem. Same exact laptop.

I’m currently on Kubuntu because it works, but I’d use Fedora KDE if only video playback in Firefox could be resolved.

2

What does Firefox say in the about:support → Media section?

3

On Fedora KDE it says everything is supported in SW except HEVC. Only VP8 and VP9 have HW decoding.

Meanwhile Kubuntu, supports everything in SW and also H264, VP8, VP9 and HEVC in HW.

4

Did you go through the RPM Fusion Howto/Multimedia guide? It’s still strange though because YouTube mainly uses VP9 encoding, which is supported.

5

I have and this guide is entirely useless and does nothing of worth. ffmpeg only added software support for H265 and none of HW accelerated codecs even work. When I tried the Intel one for HW accelerated, it said intel-media-driver doesn’t even exist.

Whole situation is so annoying. I like Fedora KDE, everything about it is great and then they somehow fuck up the codecs situation rendering it entirely useless for multimedia laptop that I use that machine for 100% of the time.

Kubuntu worked great, but for some dumb reason pCloud Drive is all broken on it for some reason, being unable to view content directly from the cloud drive.

So now I’m back to Ubuntu again because it plays Youtube with HW acceleration and pCloud Drive actually works. So annoying and stupid.

6

Multimedia is the bane of Fedora’s existence.

7

I’ve now finally found a guide that actually worked. The others seem to miss steps or something, it’s why Intel media thing didn’t even install, but it did with this one:

Additional codecs at the end still didn’t work tho.

8

what’s wrong with Firefox Hardware acceleration - Fedora Project Wiki ?

Can easily be found with a query using a search engine of your choice with the terms ‘fedora firefox hw decoding’

which one? Supported are the video codecs H264, VP9. VP8, HEVC and AV1 if implemented in the GPU.
post output of vainfo

9

The RPM Fusion howto guide above is not complete somehow and didn’twork.

I’ve used this one that did work:

Except last one somehow didn’t work.

10

Did you even look at the page I linked to?

AV1? Maybe not implemented in Intel Pentium N6000 ?

11

Not that, I know AV1 isn’t supported, most devices don’t support it except newest discrete GPUs.

I’m talking about this:
sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia

Fedora KDE claims this command is not correct and does nothing. Mentions some dnf5 or whatever of which none is mentioned in the guide.

12

Sorry the guide didn’t work for you.

As mentioned above, could you try running vainfo and post the output here? If the command is not found, you need to install libva-utils using sudo dnf install libva-utils.

Also from to the guide you linked, could you confirm that you have installed intel-media-driver and ffmpeg? You can check by running rpm -q ffmpeg and rpm -q intel-media-driver. Could you post the output here as well?

13

As I said, thr guide I posted did work. Not any others I’ve tried. I have no clue why, but the one I linked installed Intel’s media driver. The others just gave me error for some reason.

14

I see. In that case, you don’t need to worry about the last step. Firefox does not require any additional codecs. Sorry for the confusion.

15

Fedora documentation is often outdated, but it is usually not hard to figure out what newer Fedora versions require. so probably a low priority for busy documentation authors.

Fedora 42 uses dnf5, so you need to read man dnf5-group which should lead you to dnf group upgrade multimedia.