Apparently I can't edit my own past questions/threads once they have been archived, so this is to provide a update to my [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1380424 previous thread] for others who may be searching for answers. The culprit was a pre-installed PC power settings controller called "Control Center 3.0" developed by Clevo. I think I had opened it just once when I first bought my laptop to set the LED lighting scheme of my keyboard, but it could also control power settings and always booted in the background on startup. This application was preventing hardware acceleration in Firefox. After uninstalling "Control Center 3.0" youtube video playback on Firefox works perfectly, but I can no longer enable the keyboard backlighting - a worthwhile tradeoff in my eyes. ''<p>Wixted [[#question-1380424|said]]</p>'' <blockquote>Despite all my searching, I have not been able to find a solution to this issue that works for me. When I start watching a youtube video, it plays fine, zero interruptions. However the moment I touch the seek bar, pause the video for a moment, anything that interrupts the playback, I cannot watch more than 2 seconds of video before it will pause as if buffering for a few seconds, play again for a few seconds, pause again etc etc. over and over and over, making it impossible to watch any video at that point. Refreshing the page will fix it, but if I have to use the seek bar to get back to where I was, then the exact same issue will re-occur. There is zero issue with playback on other browsers, such as chrome or edge. I have tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, various codecs, user agents, refreshed firefox, started it in troubleshooting mode etc, nothing has helped. </blockquote>