Insomnic Dreams

There’s a weird bug in Firefox that when watching videos on YouTube or Hulu you will see a little video lag every 10 seconds or so… and luckily someone figured out how to fix it.

The fix was presented quite some time ago actually but I only just came across it and it has made watching online video so much more pleasant – and it’s an easy fix.

1. Open Firefox and in the Location/Address Bar type in about:config and hit Enter.
2. You are now looking at some of the advanced functions that can be customized.
3. In the “Filter” line at the top of the list (where your cursor should already be blinking) type in session and it will automatically reduce the listings.
4. Now find “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double click it.
   That number is how many milliseconds between the times that Firefox saves your current browsing session in case of a crash and 10000 milliseconds equals 10 seconds – the same amount of time between video freezes.
5. Change that number to something different. 300000 is 5 minutes and 120000 is 2 minutes. I actually switched mine to 600000, which is 10 minutes, because I don’t worry about session saving much.

That’s it. You should now have much smoother video playback at YouTube.

UPDATE: With HTML5 being used at YouTube and Vimeo now, it would be beneficial to switch to an HTML5 compatible browser such as Chrome and Safari (at the time of this writing). Firefox will be supported on those sites soon as well.

Related posts:

1. Firefox 3 Beta
2. Firefox Wins Me Over – Mostly
3. Google Chrome Browser
4. Netflix Watch Now Supports Mac