[Bug]: Certain Videos glitch out into a white screen

[liammcsh2008]

Guidelines

• [X] I have encountered this bug in the latest release of FreeTube.
• [X] I have encountered this bug in the official downloads of FreeTube.
• [X] I have searched the issue tracker for open and closed issues that are similar to the bug report I want to file, without success.
• [X] I have searched the documentation for information that matches the description of the bug I want to file, without success.
• [X] This issue contains only one bug.

Describe the bug

1. Go to a certain video
2. Click play
3. FreeTube Glitches out and video gets a white screen

Expected Behavior

Video should play normally

Issue Labels

causes crash, content not loading

FreeTube Version

v0.22.0

Operating System Version

Windows 11 version 23H2

Installation Method

.exe

Primary API used

Local API

Last Known Working FreeTube Version (If Any)

No response

Additional Information

Result of new video player update

Nightly Build

• [ ] I have encountered this bug in the latest nightly build.

[absidue]

As with your last bug report, please provide a lot more information, ideally in the original message so we don't have to ask you for it. The more information you can provide the more likely we are going to be able to investigate t and find a solution. Using vague language like "certain videos" but not actually providing the videos, doesn't help, because we can't read minds, we have no idea what is happening on your computer unless you provide details.

[liammcsh2008]

[tuxayo]

@liammcsh2008 links please, to make it as easy as possible.

[liammcsh2008]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AodJG8o8UA0

[liammcsh2008]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mpwYovWYFiE

[liammcsh2008]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xXBHkxJPhwU don't forget about that too

[Nvixbl]

Been experiencing it most of the time too. I don't think this has to do with specific videos as it happens too often, reloading the video and the app rarely works.

Seems to be a problem on Youtube.JS's side (InnerTube):

OS: Arch Linux (Wayland) Source: Flathub Version: 0.22.0

[absidue]

@Nvixbl That is completely unrelated, it's yellow so just a warning and it's part of the YouTube response that FreeTube doesn't even use.

[PHY1643]

I am also experiencing this. However, it does not occur with "certain" videos; it occurs with nearly any video. If I open a video, click play, and then switch to either "full window" or "full screen", the video blanks out to white with the tiny frowny face at the upper right. (Audio continues to play.) Same thing if I move the FreeTube window from one screen to another while a video is playing.

My info: OS: Linux (Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS) FreeTube Version: 0.22.0 Beta (Flatpak) Hardware: Intel i7-10170U (integrated graphics); 16GB RAM

[0Nero0]

Only happens in the flatpak app for me, appimage works fine.

[Erothas]

I was about to create a new issue about this yesterday, but I got lazy, and waited for someone else to do it instead. As @PHY1643 stated, this happens with nearly any video for me. There are a few weird things about it though:

• Once you enable the picture-in-picture mode, the video starts playing just fine; in the separate picture window, of course.
• The problem does not occur all the time. So, I switched on my PC an hour ago, and it was working fine. I quit freetube, and decided to relaunch it a bit later. Now it's back to the white screen. So, after experiencing this for two days, it seems to random.
• I believe this issue is only exclusive to the flatpak variant on Linux.

[PHY1643]

One other comment (Flatpak only; I've not tested other installs): I've found that once a video blanks out to a white screen, the only way I can reliably restore proper functionality is to quit FreeTube, clear out its cache (manually, via the terminal), relaunch FreeTube, and restart the video. If I don't clear the cache and pre-emptively set the window size/function, then I get a white screen again and have to start over.

[chev2]

In my case, this appears to be some sort of hardware acceleration issue. I always get this warning in the dev tools console whenever a video 'crashes'/turns into a white screen: ...which points to it being some sort of mishap with my GPU. I have an AMD RX 6700 XT for reference. I'm running the Flatpak version of FreeTube but I haven't tested any other formats like the AppImage.

Also, I'd like to point out that for me, the audio track of the video continues to work, so it's only video that's breaking.

A workaround I found was disabling the Flatpak permission device=dri (If you use Flatseal then it's "GPU acceleration" under the Device category) which I assume makes FreeTube fall back to using software-based rendering. I don't really need hardware acceleration so this works fine for me as a solution.

In case it's needed, here's my system specs:

- OS: EndeavourOS Linux (kernel version 6.6.58-1-lts)
- CPU: Intel i5-9600K
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (kernel driver: amdgpu)
- 32 GB RAM
- FreeTube Flatpak version: 0.22.0 Beta
- Mesa driver version: 24.2.5

[absidue]

@miltuss You were banned from the Matrix room for verbally attacking maintainers and other FreeTube users and continuing even after being asked to stop multiple times. To quote the FreeTube Matrix room rules:

Please act appropriately. [...] If another user asks you to stop doing something, you should stop.

https://docs.freetubeapp.io/community/matrix/

[absidue]

@chev2 Thank you for the detailed information, definitely sounds like an issue with hardware acceleration which is causing Chromium's player to crash (if you look in the top left corner of the white area you'll notice a square with a :( inside of it, which to me at least seems to indicate that it crashed). As you are using Linux and an AMD GPU could you please try running FreeTube with --enable-features=''? In the past some people have had issues with VA-API and AMD GPUs with FreeTube.

[absidue]

Another thing to check is if you get anything interesting logged to the terminal when the crash happens (you'll have to launch FreeTube from the terminal), maybe it is logging it there instead of to the devtools as something is crashing in the internals of Chromium.

[Nvixbl]

Are these errors relevant? I found these only showing up in the console whenever this issue with the video image happens, the audio works fine, no other errors reported. I'm running Nvidia proprietery drivers.

[absidue]

@Nvixbl No, those hopefully shouldn't be related those are about the thumbnails you see when you hover over the seek bar.

Can you try running FreeTube from your terminal and see if anything interesting pops up there when the error happens?

[Nvixbl]

@absidue here's what shows up upon launching the app:

Also the images displayed on hover work all the time even though the video itself doesn't and so far I haven't experienced this issue on my other machine with the AMD APU (flatpak too), giving you all the info I can think of because I got no idea what to look for tbh.

[absidue]

Okay that is very interesting, according to the log something is going wrong while doing something with images, so the GPU process restarts itself in an attempt to recover from it, which is why video playback ends. Thank you for all the information. I'll try figuring out what is different about the images on the watch page compared to the rest of the app that causes the problems.

[kccloy]

Ubuntu 24.04 ARC-750 graphics works fine with --enable-features='' mentioned earlier

Without flag console session though I forgot to see which timestamp matches the white screen. Not sure it's helpful but different than previous and no image errors (or rather different image error maybe?):

$ freetube --no-sandbox [7253:1101/182041.849601:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 1 times! [7253:1101/182053.920518:ERROR:gbm_wrapper.cc(431)] nullptr returned from gbm_bo_import [7253:1101/182053.920634:ERROR:shared_image_factory.cc(946)] CreateSharedImage: could not create backing. [7253:1101/182053.920770:ERROR:gpu_service_impl.cc(1164)] Exiting GPU process because some drivers can't recover from errors. GPU process will restart shortly. [7215:1101/182053.938726:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(1007)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=8704 [7429:1101/182134.481599:ERROR:gbm_wrapper.cc(431)] nullptr returned from gbm_bo_import [7429:1101/182134.481686:ERROR:shared_image_factory.cc(946)] CreateSharedImage: could not create backing. [7429:1101/182134.481765:ERROR:gpu_service_impl.cc(1164)] Exiting GPU process because some drivers can't recover from errors. GPU process will restart shortly. [7215:1101/182134.491389:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(1007)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=8704 [7580:1101/182155.896772:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 1 times! [7580:1101/182155.905340:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 2 times! [7580:1101/182157.685376:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 3 times!

[KPCOFGS]

Same problem here #5681