System crashes Firefox youtube vlc

When watching youtube on Firefox, Youtube become increasingly slow after a couple of hours (rendering the page and seeking becomes unresponsive). This can be expedited by also starting a movie in VLC.
After a while the system just hangs, I can still see the desktop and hear music playing. The mouse cursor can be moved. I can also still start a terminal session with e.g. ctrl+alt+F2.

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this. From what I can gather from my system is that I have enough free memory (about 48GB available), the cpu is not taxed at all and the temperatures are ok.

Generally the system is very stable and I have no problems running the Dead Space Remake, Total Warhammer 3, Diablo Resurrected.

The issues started happening about a month ago, hard to tell. Before this the system has been running stable for over 2 years now.

Relevant system specifications:
RX 7900XTX
R9 7950X3D
64GB memory 6000 mt/s cl30

I run XFCE and the system has the latest updates as of yesterday.

Things that might cause this I think are hardware acceleration in Firefox and/or VLC. GPU Memory leaks, or just a bug in the drivers.

I started using Firefox again a few days ago (I had been using Chromium for several years before that). The first thing I noticed after a while was exactly what you are describing here. My immediate reaction was: Firefox has finally pulled up its heels. It was a completely new profile without any legacy issues. Ideology and data protection aside - this is what drives users straight to Chromium and its derivatives and I can understand that very well.

Well the thing is, its only with youtube and its very recent for me. All other sites remain responsive or are maybe less affected.

For me it only happens on YT. As I said, Chromium doesn’t have it.

Ah clear, might it have been that Google is pushing the AV1 encoding instead of their own format recently? I’ll have a look if there is an addon that forces the use of a different format.

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Well that did not solve the problem. I disabled av1 in Firefox entirely.

When it happened I check RAM and VRAM. I was using around 18/64GB RAM and 1.3/24GB VRAM. Seems that is not the problem.
I tried restarting my display manager LightDM. This results in a login screen, but as soon as I login (on ctrl+alt+F7) the screen stays black and I only see the mouse cursor.

Not sure what other steps to take.

This never happens for me with firefox(and UBlock Origin).
i rarely use vlc so don’t know about that but I think it’s something ells that causes it.