I have happily been using LEAP 42.3 for a long time but recently (probably due to an update) I cannot watch many streaming videos anymore in Firefox (also Chromium does not work). Youtube is still OK, luckily.
For instance, I cannot watch any video anymore from this site: https://www.tagesschau.de/
This site tells me, that I am missing H.264, H.265 and MPEG-4 ASP support (among other things). https://html5test.com/
I had pulled in the patented multimedia codecs long time ago, but because of this problem I redid the procedure as outlined here: https://opensuse-community.org/First, the packages got downgraded and changed vendor from packman to opensuse and then during the “Switch system packages” part they were upgraded again and changed vendor to packman again, but it did not help.
currently the packman build of ffmpeg4 does not compile for LEAP 42.3 (the OSS version does not support restricted formats) http://lists.links2linux.de/pipermail/packman/2018-July/015706.html
Firefox uses the latest version of ffmpeg installed it can use 4.0 3.4 or lower atm your only choices are remove ffmpeg4 (and it’s libraries libavcodec58 libavformat58 etc)
unfortunately chromium can’t use older versions of ffmpeg but you could use chrome
I had the same problem here with my wife’s laptop. I messed around with the codecs a bit, but could not solve it.
I installed chrome (where all the necessary codecs are builtin) and that works. That will have to do for now.
atm an unrestricted version of ffmpeg-4 can not be build for LEAP 42.3 meaning Chromium won’t play restricted formats and while Firefox can use older versions of ffmpeg by default it uses the newest it can find on the system so if you have ffmpeg-4 libs (libavcodec58 libavformat58) firefox will use them although in LEAP 42.3 they don’t work http://lists.links2linux.de/pipermail/packman/2018-July/015706.html
they might get fixed but when will that be … http://lists.links2linux.de/pipermail/packman/2018-August/015715.html
a workaround is to remove the ffmpeg-4 libs libavcodec58 and libavformat58 and use ffmpeg 3.4 libavcodec57 and libavformat57
there is no fix for Chromium as it uses the system ffmpeg Chrome comes with it’s own ffmpeg build (I’m not sure which version as I don’t have Chrome) and vivaldi from packman seams to work for me (but I’m on 15)
the LEAP 42.3 lifespan has been increased up to june 2019 so I’m guessing the packman maintainers are going to fix this https://news.opensuse.org/2018/08/08/opensuse-leap-42-3-end-of-life-is-extended/
I’d just give it some time and for the time being remove chromium and downgrade ffmpeg and for the time being use chrome
This is good news!
Btw. you don’t have to remove chromium.
When you remove libavcodec58, YaST asks you if you want to downgrade Chromium to 66.0.3359.170-158.1
So you can still have both until the problem is fixed ( although not the latest version of Chromium ).
there are two issues with keeping an old version of chromium arround #1 unless you lock it
zypper al chromium
running an update either with zypper up or from the update applet will reinstall the broken ffmpeg-4 libraries #2 running old software especially browsers can be a security risk
my suggestion would be remove chromium for the time being and if you want a chromium based browser use chrome from google https://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/
and keep an aye on packman’s ffmpeg-4 packages (currently there are only TW and LEAP 15.0 builds)
when a LEAP 42.3 build is out you can reinstall chromium and update the ffmpeg libraries to version 58
yes packaman has finally released ffmpeg-4 for LEAP 42.3 so Chromium and Firefox should work fine now if you have ffmpeg-4 from OSS you’d still need to do a vendor change to packman
Thank you very much I_A and theo222! I had this problem for a long time and couldn’t figure it out. After switching libavcodec58 and libavformat58 to packman, finally all videos play fine again, in both Firefox and Chromium.