Fix Flash Video Flickering or Stuttering in Firefox
24 August, 2009
YouTube and other flash based videos stutter/flicker in Firefox, and this is a major annoyance (usually Firefox has none) with Firefox. This does not happen with other browsers, so why is Firefox causing this? well Its because of its amazing snapshot system which takes a snapshot of your browsing every 10 seconds, this is very nice but this is the main cause of the flickering effect. So how do you get rid of it? Well there is a simple and easy fix for this issue.
- Open Firefox options with about:config (type this in address bar and press enter without quotes).
- In the configuration settings in the filter box type: browser.sessionstore.interval
- You will find this setting to be with the default value of 10000 (this is in milliseconds which is 10 sec)
- Change the value to a higher state anything more than 60000 is good but we recommend that you set it to 120000 which is 2 min or 120 seconds.
- Restart Firefox and load a flash video and now the flickering or stuttering has gone.
hmmm alittle strange, how can changing session restore options affect video loading?
on August 25, 2009
@Meena Bassem:
It doesn’t fix video loading..it fixes jerky playback of video due to the session being saved every 10 seconds.
on August 25, 2009
Didn’t work.
on August 25, 2009
Tried this it helped somewhat, but it still jerks somewhat.
on August 28, 2009
This appears to be an issue with all flash applications and FF as well. Quite interestingly, I have also had an issue with being able to view web based PDF files. I have FF3.5.3, XP, and Adobe Acrobat Pro 9. I have NONE of these issues when I switch to IE. Why can’t FF and Adobe play well with others….
on October 9, 2009
See bug 490122 in Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122) – the latest theory is that it’s actually to do with garbage collection, as the session restore tweak only helps some people and not to the full extent.
on November 1, 2009
@Roman: That’s true to some extent but I think its fixed in the new Firefox 3.5.x versions coz I don’t see the bug anymore.
on November 1, 2009
This doesn’t fix the issue with Firefix 3.5.7 on Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit. I had this problem with 3.5.6, but it magically went away (read: they snuck in the fix under our noses).
on February 6, 2010