Some Firefox users noticed playback issues on YouTube for several months. These affected high resolution videos only, from 1080p and up. To make matters worse, no clear pattern could be identified.
Some videos played fine, others would stop abruptly when they ran out of buffer.
Clearly this isn’t an anti-competition effort.
Oh lol so that was it, yesterday all of a sudden 1440p and 4k videos were unwatchable, it was a stutter fest and thought something was wrong with my gpu.
Ya I’ve had this issue for months now, the video will freeze when the original 10 seconds of buffer is used, and it’ll play fine if I skip another 10 seconds but just buffer indefinitely otherwise.
You can get an extension to easily change your browser ‘user agent’ to make YouTube think you’re on chrome lol
I have had the same issue for at least a month now. I use YouTube Premium, the fuck am I paying for?
I already have an uBlock dude, it’s just I like to support content creators on YouTube by having Premium.
Support them directly instead of whatever peanuts google decides to graciously give them.
Reminder for everyone to use a user-agent spoofing extension to make their Firefox appear to be chrome/another browser to Google
sadly, skewing stats like that gives Google more reason not to support Firefox in the long run.
It seems Netflix is able to detect that spoofing, and sends this error when trying to play videos, “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later.”. I had to disable my add-ons one by one to identify that it was User Agent Switcher causing it.
Simple solution is to not pay Netflix and just pirate their content. They go out of their way to make the experience worse for paying customers on a regular basis. Sonarr+Jellyfin on an old computer with no video card and you’ve got a better Netflix where your content doesn’t just magically disappear or fail to play on some devices.
This ends with $500/mo Netflix subscriptions. An employee comes to your house and holds a laptop up in front of your couch while looking for hidden cameras camming the show.
Bathroom breaks are allowed, but they’ll pause the show.
I’ve been really ahpy with Stremio + Real-Debrid. Yes, it costs money, yes it’s worth it (less than 3€/month).
The DRM module tells Netflix you are on Firefox. For Netflix I would use Chrome on Wine tbh, it now supports 1080p w/o extensions. Or maybe Chromium w/ ChromeOS’ Widevine module.
Any you recommend? I tried this during during the first round of YouTube fuckiness on Firefox, and it didn’t seem to make a difference.
I’m also probably the least techy person on Lemmy, so chances are high that I fucked something up.
When it all goes down, there’s always the option of just downloading what you want to watch and watch it in your favorite media player. That’s what I do on my phone since I refuse to watch ads and they make everything buffer. Hit the dl button and in under a minute i have the video downloaded in hd.
I stopped watching on their website due to this. It’s faster and I get better scalers on ytdl(p)+mpv
mpv? yt-dlp?
mpv is a media player, kind of like VLC but more powerful and lightweight.
yt-dlp is a CLI (command line interface) tool that allows you to download youtube videos as videos, videos without audio, or just as audio files.
Could you elaborate on your workflow for that? I am really interested in doing the same.
Personally, I copy the url from the link or at worst the url bar after clicking into youtube.
Then ‘mpv + [pasted url]’ into a terminal (I use Yakuake as a quick terminal) and it’s away quicker than youtube.com anyway.
mpv automagically invokes ytdl/yt-dlp if you have it installed on linux or if it’s in the same directory as mpv or in a directory added to your windows search paths on windows. MacOS, just use a package manager like macports/homebrew.
