Hello there. I'm using a Motorola E5 Plus (Android) and have an issue. My video playback is extremely choppy and stuttering badly. It happened on my old Galaxy S7 as well, but not as much. It also happens on my PC often, which is a decent gaming rig. It also happens on multiple wifi networks from different ISPs, all on chrome. I have used Puffin and it occurs much less often but it does still crop up, seems a 20% chance where my phone is about a 70% chance, and PC is more like a 20% (to stutter).

It occurs indiscriminately as well. Sometimes a 4K 5 minute video plays buttery smooth while a 480p 6 minute loop stutters every half second. There's no visible pattern, and after 30 minutes of looking around the forums and finding nothing similar I'm making a thread for it.

So, the question: Does/did anyone else have this issue and how to fix it? Please god, don't take away my porn!

Edit: I forgot to mention, yes ive downloaded many of these videos and the stuttering carries over into my personal video players as well.

Motorola E5 Plus is lower end android phone, so I would be extremely surprised if it did have the juice to play any 4K stuff without a hitch. I have used relatively higher end phones last years so I can't completely comment on the performance of stuff, but I remember 1080p 60 FPS videos running fine on my old Nexus 5X and I generally test some of my uploads on phone as well.

There's much more to videos other than lenght and resolution, two main components next to resolution which will effect your playback experience are bitrate and framerate. 360p 12 FPS 500kbps video is extremely easy to handle by anything, while 1080p 60 FPS 30mbps video can lag even on some computers, let alone mobile. This is partially why twitters MP4 files (they also convert GIFs to MP4) are extremely low bitrate as this not only saves on storage, but also on bandwidth and plays well and fast on even the lowest end devices without battery drain. Also why there was so many people complaining when youtube allowed 60 FPS uploads as many couldn't see those when they could've seen old 30 FPS videos just fine.

Additionally as we aren't videohosting site, we simply embed files exactly like they were uploaded. This introduces more variables into play, including VP8 and VP9 codecs variety and constant and variable bitrate mode encoded videos. So if there's a video which is 10mbps constant bitrate VP8, it can run much better than 10mbps constant quality VP9 as you might lack hardware acceleration for it and even if it's avarage 10mbps it could jump up to 20mbps on more complex scenes.

One solution which would most likely be the best in long term would be for the site to implement video samples, so similar to images you would get downscaled and consistant files to watch, however that's down to our single coder or if someone with knowledge was nice enough to do it as site is open source now. Before that however, I have tried to include on webm posts sources and descriptions links to artist provided mirrors like gfycat, redgifs, .moe/MEGA/Gdrive filehost links, MP4 versions, etc. so that if someone does have issue with the file on the site and file isn't broken or corrupted, they could still see the content.

Thanks, I've been having the same issues for forever now on my G6 play... Couldn't figure out why some worked just fine (usually short vids) while the longer/larger ones would freeze for a few moments every so many seconds... I also always had normal speed sound but slowmo animation on the big ones

Hm, I understood enough of that. Kinda disappointed as i adore this phone, was better than my S7 in so many ways and just as tough. Thanks for the tech talk Mairo, that explains a lot of things outside of E6 as well.

What you two could try is to download the video and play it back in a dedicated player app (personally I use MX Player to great effect). The benefit of a dedicated app is that the app has less overhead that isn't used for video display than a browser has, thus ensuring that more resources of the phone are actually used to facilitate smooth playback, or at the very least that other elements don't need to be refreshed every frame like you have with animated ads on websites.

It like won't allow smooth playback of 4k files, but it might be enough for both quality 1080p or 2k files.

notmenotyou said:
What you two could try is to download the video and play it back in a dedicated player app (personally I use MX Player to great effect). The benefit of a dedicated app is that the app has less overhead that isn't used for video display than a browser has, thus ensuring that more resources of the phone are actually used to facilitate smooth playback, or at the very least that other elements don't need to be refreshed every frame like you have with animated ads on websites.

It like won't allow smooth playback of 4k files, but it might be enough for both quality 1080p or 2k files.

ta'sier_aussar said:
Edit: I forgot to mention, yes ive downloaded many of these videos and the stuttering carries over into my personal video players as well.

Also from my personal testing, video playback if it stutters with opera, it will stutter also with chrome and firefox and google photos app and VLC.
Of course doesn't hurt to try.

Also one interesting thing I have noticed is that GIFs seem to always lag, regardless of what I use, but AJK actually pointed out to me that with browsers opening the GIF in new tab makes it playback more properly. So this feels like some level of power saving feature in case websites still use GIFs for adspots.