Freezes on Twitch

Hello,
I have a very peculiar problem on Ubuntu MATE 17.10. It already happened on 17.04 and does too on my laptop with UM 16.04.

When I watch a stream or video on Twitch (from the website), it works fine. But if I open a new tab in the browser and get back to the one with Twitch, 80% of the time, the page will be completely unresponsive: can’t click on anything on it and the video is frozen. The sound continues to play perfectly, though. It’ll usually fix itself by waiting a bit (like 30 seconds or a bit more), though sometimes it won’t and I get a message from Google Chrome asking if I want to close the unresponsive page.

It happens both with Google Chrome and Firefox. AFAIK, Twitch uses HTML5 video (I’m not 100% sure they’ve completely switched to HTML5 or if the video itself is still played through Flash). I haven’t seen the issue appear on other websites like YouTube.

I’m pretty sure the issue is tied to something installed by Ubuntu MATE: a few weeks ago, I was on GNOME when I considered to switch back to MATE. As soon as I installed the DE packages (ubuntu-mate-desktop), the issue immediately appeared in my current session, without loging out or starting the MATE session. So, I think that some package installed by MATE starts a daemon or service that, for some reason, interferes with the Twitch website. My first guess would be ffmpegthumbnailer but I don’t understand how/why a thumbnailer would interfere with a website… (I’ve tried to remove it but no change.)

My PC has an AMD GPU with Mesa but I doubt it’s related, as my laptop on which the issue appears too has a nVidia GPU (happens with nouveau and the proprietary driver).

Any idea about this and where to start looking to identify the issue?

1 Like

I’m having the same problem. So far, what I’ve found is that Twitch works on Windows 10 with my current ISP, but it this problem isn’t limited to Mate; my Android phone as well as Linux Mint also have the same problem and these are all separate devices. Included in mine are broken gifs, unable to login as well as unable to watch livestreams.

I’ve got no idea of what the problem is or how to fix it, but I’d thought I’d share my experience.

I’m not sure this is the same issue, as I have no problem login in Twitch or watch streams (except for the occasional freeze). Haven’t had problems with GIFs (in Twitch in your case, or in general on websites? I’m not sure where there would be GIFs on Twitch…).
Anyway, thinking about it, I don’t remember having the “unresponsive page” issue in quite some time. It still happens that switching tabs triggers a buffering of the video but the interface works fine.

As a sidenote unreleated to MATE, I’ve had issues using Twitch on an old (5 years old) Android tablet: the ads completely crash the app. Is it the kind of issue you’re having on your phone?

Sorry, i meant thumbnails instead of gifs. The thumbnails won’t load, I’m unable to login to the app on Android, and in all cases I can’t watch a livestream, though I can on occasion watch the uploaded content.

Perhaps it is unrelated; it’s just my observation that Android, Mate and Mint all have the same problem because I not only test twitch using the app, but also using web browsers on mobile (Firefox, Chrome). I test Firefox and Chrome on my Windows computer and Twitch works fine so I’m fairly confident it’s not the browser either (I’m not sure, I’m not a programmer after all)

I’m using a 2 year old Galaxy S7 Edge running on Android Nougat - it entirely won’t play content. On another phone with Android Oreo it works okay except that sometimes the app will just stop itself and needs to be relaunched; particularly when I switch audio from headphones to speakers and vice versa. I’ve tried rummaging online to see if it’s a persistent problem with Android, and it is, although all the information I gather were largely anecdotal and not conclusive.

Try sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extra(a litlle google search give me this https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/twitch-not-working-on-firefox-for-linux-ubuntu/15634/2

Not sure if you’re replying for me or for Ikhwan_Arif but I’ve not had the original issue in a while, it seems to have disappeared with UM 18.04. The proprietary codecs are one of the first things I add when installing an Ubuntu distro, so I believe it isn’t be related to the issue I had.

Now, Twitch seems to have a bit of buffering issues when using Firefox and trying to pause a video (it doesn’t pause immediately, only does it after several seconds; I assume it finishes displaying the content of the buffer before actually stopping the playback) that I don’t get with Chrome, so it’s probably a Firefox bug.

Even I have faced this problem
Mine was intermittent, restarting the application or the system solved my problem