Videos freeze in fullscreen mode in Chrome and Firefox

Question

When I maximize a flash OR HTML5 video, e.g. on youtube, the picture freezes but the video continues to play. I can still hear the sound and even see the mouse cursor switching from normal cursor to hand cursor when I hover over the position where a control button should be but the whole chrome window becomes unresponsive. The video is played fine if I don't enter fullscreen mode. That affects both flash and HTML5 videos.

How can I solve this issue?

System: Ubuntu 14.04 Google Chrome Stable 37.0.2062.120-1 Nvidia-331 331.38-0ubuntu7.1

Solution 1

Disable HW acceleration in Firefox and Chrome/Chromium. Today's Google-Chrome update fixed the issue for me but before that, disabling the hardware acceleration was what fixed the problem.

Solution 2

I had the same issue, people have found this thread helpful. However it didn't work for me, so I troubleshooted for a bit, and figured that it must be some clash between the kernel handling my discrete video card(Nvidia GeForce 630m) , which however seems to be fixed by installing and running tlp. Added bonus, more battery life :) :)

Solution 3

Type about:config in FireFox address bar, accept the risk warning. in the about:config search bar type:

media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled;              

Set it to true

Also change:

media.hardware-video-decoding.failed;                        

Set it to false

Comments

[Wilf]

Also, do any errors appear when you run Chrome in terminal, and you try full-screening the video(s)?

[Achim A]

nope, no errors whatsoever

[Daniel]

Thanks for this. It fixed the random freezing of html5 video on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 3rd Gen when trying to leave the fullscreen mode

[Alexey]

Could you explain please why this is expected to help?

[Akash]

This worked for me. Thanks a lot!

[Akash]

Forgot to mention. I also change this layers.gpu-process.enabled to false in about:config

[Dmitry Mugtasimov]

Worked for me. Is there a fix for this instead of a work around? Meaning that I would like to keep using hardware acceleration while having full screen working properly.