YouTube in Firefox won't stop streaming

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thunor
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YouTube in Firefox won't stop streaming

#1 Post by thunor »

I don't exactly know where to post this but this issue compromises the integrity of my computer (slacko-5.5).

Sunday 8th September I noticed the green light blinking like mad on the ethernet port on the side of my computer. I'd been using it earlier and I'd left Firefox open but I was doing things elsewhere so I was alarmed to see that sort of activity -- I pulled the cable out of the port. It was a week ago now and it was my first experience of this problem but at the time I just thought it was a one-off oddity. Using iptraf I did see that running a YouTube video and closing the tab doesn't stop the data downloading and I can duplicate this right now -- I have to close the browser to stop the downloading.

My 20GB bandwidth maxed out a couple of days before my next billing period and when I looked at my bandwidth usage there was a massive 5GB spike for that Sunday and the night time is free so it's recorded seperately and that was 2.5GB!

I downloaded the latest Flash last night (about:plugins reports Version: 11,2,202,310) and Firefox updates itself (currently 23.0.1) because I downloaded it and installed it into ~/my-applications/firefox ages ago but it's still happening.

I just wanted to write this up because it's so bad. Maybe it's happening to somebody else and they haven't realised it yet. I've been using iptraf to monitor the usage but the network tray icon is useful as you can hover over it with the mouse and see the day's usage in the tooltip.

I am now justly paranoid about YouTube. I tested a Flash video on BBC News and that was fine.

Regards,
Thunor

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Karl Godt
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#2 Post by Karl Godt »

One day I had that too that upload was more than 100MB after I fell asleep .
I guess that since I had a server binary running , a metacrawler had backed up my partition .
:D

I use a varing mix of flash 10er versions in FF-3.X series to be able to grab the unsplitted videos fro /tmp or cache . Had success with that in FF-22 with flash-10.2.x - when I change the video quality while it is running .

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mikeb
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#3 Post by mikeb »

Hmm perhaps the plugin wrapper keeps flash going even when the tab is closed...flash itself will keep streaming until all is downloaded by default. Also recent flash versions might be using curl or mozilla libs (they are listed as dependancies now but did not used to) to download rather than through the browser...this would support the download to ram method. Indeed older flash does not do this and the file downloads to /tmp as karl says.

Perhaps try running with the plugin wrapper disabled...I do anyway...if you are still allowed to do so and test out an older flash..latest is not greatest when it comes to adobe.

mike

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Karl Godt
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#4 Post by Karl Godt »

In fact modern FF does not need flashplayer, it would use HTML5 instead . J
ust find the libflshplayer.so in /usr/*/* and delete it and fire FF up again .

Older FF used also the flash in their */firefox/plugin directory , FF-22 only looks for it in /usr/lib/mozilla .

I
string | grep -i FlashPlayer
the version out of the libflashplayer.so and rename it to libflashplayer-VER.SI.ON.so ,
so can have several of these in plugin directory and they all show up in the Add-ons tool gui ,
but FF seems to use the newest one, even if that is disabled and lesser versions are enabled .

Also deleting $HOME/.adobe and $HOME/.macromedia might help to create new default settings .

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mikeb
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#5 Post by mikeb »

My other suggestion is to have flashblock and use a you tube downloader addon so YOU have control over the process.

The internet sucks yer cpu... :D

mike

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thunor
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#6 Post by thunor »

Thanks for the tips guys, fantastic stuff.

I use NoScript so I removed youtube.com and ytimg.com from the Whitelist, restarted Firefox, visited https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkVBf9NT86o and my usage went from 57MB to 200MB before I decided to close the browser -- I didn't even see anything for that, just a black square! And yes, Forbid Adobe Flash is ticked in NoScript's Embeddings tab.

I deactivated Flash in Tools->Add-ons->Plugins and visited the same URL and now I'm safe.

I've got FlashGot and it still tells me that there are 8 streams/videos available for that link above even though Flash is now disabled. They range from 5MB to 54MB so I selected and downloaded the 19MB flv which took about 5 minutes but it's perfectly adequate for previewing a game -- I viewed it in gnome-mplayer.

Am I correct in guessing that the YouTube Flash player normally downloads all those 8 videos (5+13+38+34+19+39+54+52=254MB) and continues to download even though I might've only watched 10 seconds and closed the tab?

[EDIT] Ok, the 8 videos are 3gpp/mp4, x-flv and webm in small, medium and large so I'm guessing that you're going to get a small, medium or large video matching your player and connection. Anyway, it doesn't matter anymore and it still doesn't appear to relate to the 143MB I just lost looking at that link.

Cheers,
Thunor
Last edited by thunor on Mon 16 Sep 2013, 18:14, edited 1 time in total.

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Karl Godt
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#7 Post by Karl Godt »

Am I correct in guessing that the YouTube Flash player normally downloads all those 8 videos and continues to download even though I might've only watched 10 seconds and closed the tab?
Not in my observations . Closing the tab is OK to stop download .

- I am not using NoScript .
- I am not using FlashDownloaders .
- I am using 2 Flashblock , but only one of them per partition :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... lashblock/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... /versions/

Both work quite well to stop autoloading and autodownloading of flash videos .

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mikeb
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#8 Post by mikeb »

it should only download the chosen format and normal behavior would be to stop when the tab is closed.

If you disabled flash and memory usage still went up perhaps we are dealing with a html5 problem rather than flash. With the plugin wrapper you would see the flash running in htop. So in other words its the browser with the problem not the plugin. Recent firefoxes are a bit of a screwy mess so a possible candidate.

The mp4 downloads seem to give a good balance and easy to extract from if wanted. flv can be crap for seeking.

mike

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thunor
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#9 Post by thunor »

mikeb wrote:If you disabled flash and memory usage still went up perhaps we are dealing with a html5 problem rather than flash. With the plugin wrapper you would see the flash running in htop. So in other words its the browser with the problem not the plugin. Recent firefoxes are a bit of a screwy mess so a possible candidate.
I just did another test.

* Flash is disabled as a plugin.
* NoScript is running and therefore no JavaScript or other embedded objects are allowed.
* For the record cookies are disabled too.

I visited the YouTube link I posted above and there was no downloading. There was a message where the video normally is telling me that Flash is required as you would expect. All the thumbnail images of the other videos down the right-hand side are grey squares.

* I next temporarily allowed youtube.com in NoScript.

Downloading then started and I closed the browser after about 34MB.

Therefore JavaScript is required to be off to stop the downloading.

I'm just writing this up for reference in case anybody else experiences the same thing. The data was downloading from IPs 72.125.175.234 and 173.194.34.98 which belong to Google.

I've got Fedora 19 on here which I installed to learn. The next step I think is to test that.

Cheers,
Thunor

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mikeb
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#10 Post by mikeb »

Hmm does sound like html5 downloading if flash is disabled.

Its javascript city since many sites have moved processing to the client from the server.

IIRC html5 was a user selected option but that may have changed now.

mike

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thunor
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#11 Post by thunor »

Well, I don't know what it is, all I know and continue to discover is that visiting a YouTube page may or may not initiate an endless data download.

I spoke too soon in my previous post because I have just duplicated this problem -- even using NoScript with JS off it can still start a massive download.

I've got too much to do at the moment with life in general so I simply used LeechBlock to block "*youtube*" which I can recommend.

I'm looking to wipe this slacko-5.5 soon and install a more up-to-date Puppy so I'm sure it will disappear as an issue.

It has crossed my mind that my system might be compromised but anything personal I encrypt with gpg and keep on an SD card away from the computer. If I have to decrypt any of those files to this computer's hard disk then I remove them afterwards with srm.

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mikeb
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#12 Post by mikeb »

Are you registered with you tube/google?

May well be related....eg html5 enabling.

mike

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