Strange Youtube stutter

Dear all,

I am experiencing a very strange way of stutter when watching Youtube videos. Every couple of minutes it repeats the previous ~0.5 sec of audio and video. There is no regular pattern of when it occurs. All other applications run without any problems.

The system is a Core2Duo desktop with 4GB RAM, 160GB SSD. I'll paste the HW specs at the end of this post. It is set up as a triple boot configuration:

1) Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon with proprietary Nvidia-340-legacy drivers, X11, latest Firefox, kernel 5.4, SystemD init.
2) Devuan 4 Gnome (Debian Bullseye based) with Nouveau drivers, Wayland, latest Firefox-ESR, kernel 5.10, Runit init.
2a) (previously I also tried Devuan 4 Mate with Nouveau drivers, X11, latest Firefox-ESR, kernel 5.10, OpenRC init)
3) MS Windows 8.1 with latest Firefox

All GNU/Linux systems are having the issue, on Windows however it does NOT occur.

It appears to be independent of distro, kernel version, GPU drivers, X11/Wayland, Firefox version, desktop environment and init system. No peaks in resource usage (RAM/HDD). No entries in dmesg. I am using Ethernet rather than Wifi, if that matters.

Toggling gfx.webrender.all setting in Firefox makes no difference. And just tested latest Chromium browser in Linux Mint - same issue.

Could anyone think of what could be causing this? I've searched the web but could not find any solution so far.

Greetings
alp_c

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Machine: Type: Desktop Mobo: Gigabyte model: EP41-UD3L v: x.x serial: <filter> BIOS: Award v: F6
date: 04/22/2010
CPU: Topology: Dual Core model: Intel Core2 Duo E7500 bits: 64 type: MCP arch: Penryn rev: A
L2 cache: 3072 KiB
flags: lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 11733
Speed: 1600 MHz min/max: 1600/2933 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1600 2: 1600
Graphics: Device-1: NVIDIA G96C [GeForce 9500 GT] vendor: ZOTAC driver: nvidia v: 340.108
bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10de:0640
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: nvidia
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa resolution: 1440x900~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: GeForce 9500 GT/PCIe/SSE2 v: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 340.108 direct render: Yes
Audio: Device-1: Intel NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio vendor: Gigabyte GA-D525TUD
driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 00:1b.0 chip ID: 8086:27d8
Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.4.0-88-generic
Network: Device-1: Realtek RTL8192CE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter driver: rtl8192ce v: kernel
port: ce00 bus ID: 03:00.0 chip ID: 10ec:8178
IF: wlp3s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Gigabyte
driver: r8169 v: kernel port: be00 bus ID: 04:00.0 chip ID: 10ec:8168
IF: enp4s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives: Local Storage: total: 149.05 GiB used: 10.76 GiB (7.2%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Intel model: SSDSA2CW160G3 size: 149.05 GiB speed: <unknown>
serial: <filter>
Partition: ID-1: / size: 27.35 GiB used: 10.76 GiB (39.3%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda7
ID-2: swap-1 size: 7.45 GiB used: 768 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda5
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 50.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 70 C
Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A

Hi

some of this may relate to hardware acceleration or the lack thereof. I note you do have one distro with accel.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1085...rks-on-windows

Its the second reply but the pathway of /lib/modprobe.d may need to be /etc/modprobe.d

2) there is fair discussion in this post too.

lots of trouble shooting there

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...os-4175684140/

Hi aus9,

thank you for looking into this.

Regarding the KMS setting in your first link I found an Arch wiki entry, that "The proprietary NVIDIA driver supports KMS (since 364.12)". My card is a legacy 340.xx, so I assume it does not apply to my card. I also couldn't locate the file nvidia-kms.conf anywhere on my system. So the only thing I changed on my Mint system was changing NVIDIA settings from auto to high performance. In a first quick test the stutter has gone.

I'm going to check with my Devuan install though, which uses Nouveau, and Arch wiki states "Intel, Nouveau, ATI and AMDGPU drivers already enable KMS automatically for all chipsets"

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kernel_mode_setting

Your second link refers to a discussion which talks about symptoms I don't have, i.e. black screen, resolution changes, waiting circle.

Best
alp_c

Originally Posted by alp_c Your second link refers to a discussion which talks about symptoms I don't have

Yes, but it was provided with the comment "lots of troubleshooting here", which I take as a hint for you to look what people did to troubleshoot the problem, and repeat some of these steps, to be able to provide some palpable info on the problem.

Back with some results.

In my Mint install, all I had to do was changing the "PowerMizer Settings" in NVIDIA Control panel from Auto/Adaptive to Maximum. Right from this moment, the stutter has gone. After rebooting, this setting changes back to Auto/Adaptive, but _still_ the issue does not appear again.

On my Devuan install with Nouveau however, the stutter is still there and I didn't find a way to fix it. I tried the h264ify extension in Firefox to force the codec to H264, but it didn't make a difference.

So it seems to be a video driver thing. Maybe Nouveau is just not that perfect for an aged video card like mine, or the video card itself might have a glitch which only the proprietary driver is able to circumnavigate?

@ondoho: I'll take another look into the troubleshooting link.

Edit: I also couldn't locate the file nvidia-kms.conf anywhere on my Devuan install, so I am assuming that KMS is not used with Nouveau either.

Did some more digging with the Devuan 4 system, which was running on Nouveau and still had the stuttering Youtube clips.

First I wanted to install proprietary Nvidia drivers (340xx), but they are no longer in the repos. Only up to Devuan 3/Debian 10 and in Ceres/Sid. I changed sources.list to Ceres and installed Nvidia legacy 340 drivers, but they did not compile against the 5.14 kernel that came with Ceres. Official Nvidia support only goes up to kernel 5.4. So I wiped the whole Devuan 4 installation and installed Devuan 3 with kernel 4.19 and Nouveau. No stutter, but a lot of tearing, no matter if Webrender was enabled or disabled in Firefox. Then I installed Nvidia drivers. Gave some warning but still worked, no stutter but still a lot of tearing. Went back to Nouveau in order to upgrade to Devuan 4 again. Before upgrading I noticed that Devuan 3 was using Wicd for network configuration, but Devuan 4 does not ship Wicd (uses Network Manager instead). So I installed Network Manager on Devuan 3. Immediately after installing there was some stuttering, but I was unable to reproduce it later. Finally I upgraded to Devuan 4 and the stutter was all back.

Honestly, I'm going to stop at this point. I've tried up and down but I'm unable to find the weak spot. I'll continue using Mint 20 with Nvidia drivers, which works perfectly on this machine. As a nice side effect, it will stop me from further distro hopping, which consumed quite a lot of time during the last months.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help me!

Originally Posted by alp_c No stutter, but a lot of tearing, no matter if Webrender was enabled or disabled in Firefox.

It's probably too late now but I wonder if the tearing was limited to Firefox.
Troubleshooting usually involves testing a symptom as broadly as possible.

lots of troubleshooting here

yes it was a weak suggestion..I was trying to be more polite...next time I will be more explicit.

thanks to ondoho for posting on that link too.