Openbox video keeps pausing on FreeBSD
 

Hi there,


I am tesing NomadBSD with Openbox, I find Youtube video keeps pauses every 10 sec. but worked fine with other flavor of *BSD, I am not sure it was Openbox or NomadBSD to caused that, but I want to stick with Openbox coz it is lightweight and responsive, any comment ?

So you are having performance issues when playing youtube video in your browser even on a lightweight desktop?
IMHO the windowmanager has very little to do with it, you should probably check your browser choice, version, configuration, number of open tabs, javascript & cookie policy...
Or you could try to play youtube videos without the browser, e.g. with mpv + youtube-dl. This is known to be much lighter on resources.

I have FreeBSD with Openbox and youtube works fine but I don't know about NomadBSD.

I tried Chrome but same result, the video pauses every 10sec. but audio part non stopping. Have not tried youtube-dl, but if we can not play the video properly straight away in browser then it is a problem to fix.

I used Nomad coz it works out of the box with Openbox, I used Gnome before and has no problem playback Youtube, it takes some tweaking to auto start a WM on FreeBSD and I don't know how to switch between different WM like on Linux.

Just give us the specs of your machine, namely CPU, RAM, GPU & driver, and type of hard drive (spinning: how fast).
It could also be a network buffering problem.

Sorry for the late reply, it is a Zotac mini black box PC with Celeron N3450 @ 1.10GHz and 4G memory, I know it is old but quite capable, if upgrade memory can fix that I will do it, also install SSD...

Over USB it will be too slow to play video, even with a faster processor, you would likely have problems - only 'possible' solution I can think of would be to increase your video buffer size, but I'm not sure that you can.

I actually installed it on the hard drive with the build in installer, I also replaced the hard drive with SSD, overall performance much improved but video playback still pausing. On the otherhand I installed Debian on a SSD for USB boot and it runs extremely well on the same machine, so there is something in Nomad or Openbox to have caused the problem.

I finally installed Gnome and now I got a basic Gnome desktop when boot up, but both my Firefox and Thunderbird stopped working with error :

"Your Firefox/Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible"

I removed both also removed the hidden profile folder and reinstall but still the same error, I am posting this with Chrome. I tested again Youtube and there is no pausing in the video, or too brief I can't see, so the problem basically fixed and it was OpenBox to blame but only on FreeBSD, Linux seems to be more reliable and fast on the same machine. Since the system pretty messed up after the changes, I will reinstall from ground up and add Gnome to see what comes.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you: Firefox is not working, so you have not tested playing video...? So for all you know, that situation could be unchanged.

Chromium works (and may have worked running under openbox if you'd tested it?).

Regarding the profile, you'll have to delete the dot files in ~/.mozilla/firefox and ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox

Or you could ensure your user has ownership of those files (as I suspect you've caused this by running firefox as root?)

You may find that performance is unchanged in firefox after you've done all that - in which case, I suggest you use chromium if it works.

Thank guys for the input, sorry if I've confused you. I reinstall the system from ground up and then add Gnome to it, I got a basic Gnome desktop but got some problem, the sound is not working I only got noise, and I can't add printer, after some messing around I decided to reinstall with GhostBSD, it is ready made everything worked so I can at least test the video playback and it worked fine on any browser, so from there I can try to install other desktop.

It's not helpful to those attempting to to assist you with these problems, if you're going to continually chop and change OS and reinstall at the first sign if an obstacle.

You could have achieved the same without seeking advice from others here.