I have a laptop connected via HDMI to a 27 inch 2560 x 1440 monitor.
I use it as Single Display being the monitor only.
There are times when I play online videos that the video does not go further than the 1st frame, and then it freezes.
I cannot completely tell when this occurs, but it is quite random. If I reboot the system the problem goes away.
I suspect this has to do with the HDMI connection and graphics card, but that is just a vague guess.
No matter the server, i.e. youtube, vimeo, etc
It happens both with Chrome and Firefox
Note: I’m having this problem right now for instance.
try to install pipewire with this package: manjaro-pipewire, it will give you dependency issues, so uninstall them, then install it again, and reboot, and check
if it doesnt work, install this package: manjaro-pulse, it will remove pipewire, reboot and check
It appears as a video / GPU issue on the surface, but it likely has something to do with the player refusing to “resume” if there is no proper audio output. By forcing the pulseaudio service to restart, you temporarily correct this issue, and thus the video player will “resume” like normal.
I noticed this with a recent update, and as alluded by @brahma above, it may in fact be due to a conflict between PipeWire and PulseAudio.
My “daily driver” laptop does not have this issue (KDE), however, my secondary laptop (Xfce) continues to suffer from this issue, of which I just do the service restart “trick” to be able to watch videos like normal.
I haven’t yet discovered a permanent fix for this (yet) on my Xfce system.
You might try @brahma’s above steps, while in the meantime use the systemctl --user restart pulseaudio trick I shared above if you need to be able to watch videos in a jiffy-type situation.
EDIT: Wait a minute! You pulled a switcheroo on me! I just realized the original poster @David5 did not reply with their results yet.
But glad the “trick” worked for your case in the meantime, which makes me wonder if @David5’s issue overlaps with ours?
I noticed you’re both using GNOME, and the “problematic” system of mine is on Xfce. However, the “no problems” system of mine is KDE.
Thanks for the suggestion, @brahma. The dependencies were going back a bit too far, trying to get me to uninstall Gnome components and all that. I’m not handy enough to use pamac properly so found this solution to get ride of PulseAudio and install Pipewire instead:
So that’s why my original hunch (which still stands) is that this is not a video / decoding / driver issue. That’s why restarting pulseaudio allows the video to continue playing. (It’s not really that your video “freezes”, it’s just that there’s a “hard pause” on the video until an audio output is “available”.
You might try the workarounds that others in this thread have shared (about installing/reinstalling the relevant packages.)
so install this: sudo pacman -S manjaro-pipewire
it will give you dependency issues, so uninstall them first, then run again the pipewire command, then reboot and test
youre uninstalling pulse audio, and its dependencies and installing pipewire instead… the target not found is you dont have installed pulseaudio-pa
this is the same command but without the pulseaudio-pa: