Sonoma Safari and videos

[jayducharme]

MacOS 13 worked perfectly for me. Since upgrading to OS 14, Safari will no longer play back online videos. Trying to play a video from either YouTube or Vimeo causes Safari to seize and the only way out is to quit. I don't have that problem in Firefox or Chrome. I have an M1 Mac mini. I don't have any ad-blockers installed. This is the first time I've seen this behavior in Safari. I did clear my cache and history, and that had no effect. Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[chabig]

Not me. Try clearing the cookies from the offending sites, and checking that content blockers aren't stopping them from playing.

 

[jayducharme]

I did, but it didn't have any effect. If others aren't having this issue, it has to be something with my configuration. But I don't understand why Safari never had a problem until I upgraded to Sonoma.

 

[chabig]

Can you test it in another account on the machine? I bet it is something in the specific user account.

 

[jayducharme]

I just checked my wife's account and the guest account. Video is non-functional in both.

 

[chabig]

Ok. Weird. Hopefully someone else will have an answer. But to continue troubleshooting try a Safari reset.

 

[chabig]

New info. I too, am having this problem. But not with YouTube. Just with X. It seems like I get a spinning circle until the entire video loads, and then it plays.

 

[jayducharme]

Ok. Weird. Hopefully someone else will have an answer. But to continue troubleshooting try a Safari reset.

I reset everything in Safari. Still no luck.

 

[jayducharme]

Update: I spent a couple hours on the phone with Apple technical support. They went through everything they could think of (deleting preferences, reinstalling the OS, going into safe mode, etc.). Nothing made any difference. They were flummoxed. They logged Safari's behavior and are having higher-level techs look into it.

 

[gank41]

I just checked my wife's account and the guest account. Video is non-functional in both.

To me that says it's just a hosed installation. Are you able to Reinstall Sonoma again, maybe from a USB Installer? Even just booting into Recovery and then Installing again might fix this. And I mean Installing OVER itself, not replacing or wiping and then installing.. Sometimes just running the installer again over itself fixes a lot.


::EDIT::
My Bad, didn't see the post about already trying to reinstall. That's a real head scratcher, then.. SO many oddball bugs this year.

 

[gank41]

New info. I too, am having this problem. But not with YouTube. Just with X. It seems like I get a spinning circle until the entire video loads, and then it plays.

This might actually just be X throttling videos.. There's been plenty of unsubstantiated reports of him throttling videos from companies & organizations he just doesn't like...

 

[swineflew]

Having the same issue on an MBP M1 Pro 16GB.

 

[jayducharme]

Having the same issue on an MBP M1 Pro 16GB.

That sucks. But I'm glad it wasn't only me. Fingers crossed that the .1 update fixes the problem.

 

[TinyMito]

M1 Pro here, for me Safari Picture in Picture will just hard crash my entire macOS.

 

[jayducharme]

M1 Pro here, for me Safari Picture in Picture will just hard crash my entire macOS.

I’m supposed to hear back from the Apple techs today. I‘ll let you all know if they’ve figured it out.

 

[jayducharme]

I just finished my second session with Apple Tech Support. The techs had suspected the mini had a bad GPU, so we ran diagnostics and there was nothing wrong. We also checked to make sure Safari wasn't running in Rosetta mode. I ran another system log and sent it in, so we'll see if they find anything new. I'm going to update to 14.1 now. I don't think that will fix the issue, but it's worth a shot.

 

[jmarus]

I'm having the exact same issue. Did you ever come to a solution?

 

[TinyMito]

I just finished my second session with Apple Tech Support. The techs had suspected the mini had a bad GPU, so we ran diagnostics and there was nothing wrong. We also checked to make sure Safari wasn't running in Rosetta mode. I ran another system log and sent it in, so we'll see if they find anything new. I'm going to update to 14.1 now. I don't think that will fix the issue, but it's worth a shot.

Definitely not hardware issue, I also sent a report via Apple Feedback app. Or online https://feedbackassistant.apple.com

 

[jayducharme]

Definitely not hardware issue, I also sent a report via Apple Feedback app. Or online https://feedbackassistant.apple.com

View attachment 2305296

I’ve done that as well.

 

[jayducharme]

My issue is resolved. The solution was to completely wipe the mini and reinstall everything from the ground up. Apparently, something got corrupted during my update from Ventura to Sonoma. Everything's now working much better than before.

 

[DataChris]

I've had this issue with videos (mostly played via Safari) crashing my entire system since MacOS Sonoma launched. It's truly the first time in well over a decade I've experienced full system/device crashes. Honestly the past decade it's been rare that even a single app crashes, but these video playback crashes hard freeze my entire MacBook (14" M1 Pro) daily/weekly with no escape via force quit, etc. A hard power down restart is the only fix (losing all work, tabs, etc in all open apps). Apple has no solution.