Firefox 46 no longer able to play H.264 videos

Hi,

On my Tumbleweed Gnome x86_64 installations Firefox is no longer able to play most HTML5 videos after the update to version 46. html5test.com shows that my browser does not support this code and youtube.com/html5 agrees.

I do not have the pacman repository enabled but instead use

media.ffmpeg.enabled=false

and install the Fluendo GStream codec packages for decoding.

How can I get back my ability to play H.264 encoded videos?

Thanks,

Robert

Hi
I have Firefox 46 on Leap and h264 is enabled (with Fluendo codecs), I see entries under about:config for media.gmp<…> what do you have under that string. On older versions there was a gstreamer blacklist, but that doesn’t exist in Firefox 46.

I haven’t found a simple way of copy-pasting all the related entries from about:config so here are a couple of screenhots.

about:config settings

http://i.imgur.com/lk203uO.png

about:support Graphics section. Note that hardware H264 support is disabled

http://i.imgur.com/plsCnaj.png

Hi
The graphics one is a red herring, my GPU doesn’t have hardware decoding either and is working :wink:

The abi entry (first line) doesn’t exist on my system, maybe that is the issue…

Need to setup a new tumbleweed system and look.

Hi
I see there is a plugin for openh264 in the Add-ons manager, what happens if you disable and restart firefox?

That does not help unfortunately. AFAIU it’s only used for WebRTC calls

Hi
Which I disable, media.peerconnection.enabled = false.

What release of fluendo codecs do you have?

$ rpm -q oneplay-gstreamer-codecs-pack 
oneplay-gstreamer-codecs-pack-21-6.x86_64

On Wed 18 May 2016 01:56:02 PM CDT, robert munteanu wrote:

Code:

$ rpm -q oneplay-gstreamer-codecs-pack
oneplay-gstreamer-codecs-pack-21-6.x86_64

Hi
OK, so just checked on a fresh Tumblweed install and all is fine with
codecs pack 22-2. Might be time to upgrade your codecs perhaps?


Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE Leap 42.1|GNOME 3.16.2|4.1.20-11-default
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Well, lucky me, my subscription has expired and I’m only entitled to version 21. I fired them an email to ask if they think upgrading to 22 would help.

If you find the time, it would be great if you could try out version 21 on your TW installation. That would at least clear out a possible problem.

Hi
May have steered you wrong. when I went to the youtube html5 test page it says H.264 is not active (red !) on Tumbleweed, on Leap it’s ticked.

The buildconfigs are the same even on Firefox ESR 38.7.0 (SLED) it’s also checked…

Might be time for a bug report…

Filed https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=980710 . Thanks for the help!

According to Fluendo support, Firefox 46 no longer uses gstreamer so there is nothing to ‘fix’ here.

I added the packman essentials repository and upgraded ffmpeg, but I’m a bit anxious about how well zypper dup will work with packman…

Hi
I use VideoLan, just did a zypper dup from it on my Tumbleweed test system, and H.264 is now OK in firefox on the youtube test page…


 zypper ar -f https://download.videolan.org/SuSE/Tumbleweed/ VideoLan
zypper ref
zypper dup --from 1
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Computing distribution upgrade...

The following 5 NEW packages are going to be installed:
  libcelt0-2 libopencore-amrnb0 libopencore-amrwb0 libvpx2 libwebpmux2

The following 6 packages are going to be upgraded:
  libavcodec56 libavformat56 libavutil54 libdvdread4 libswresample1 libswscale3

No ffmpeg in sight…

At least for my instance, it pulls in .so files provided by ffmpeg:

$ ps -ef | grep firefox
robert   12434     1 20 11:40 tty2     01:08:08 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox

$ lsof -p 12434 | grep libav
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() tracefs file system /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
      Output information may be incomplete.
firefox 12434 robert  mem       REG               0,38   371496    4962915 /usr/lib64/libavutil.so.55.17.103
firefox 12434 robert  mem       REG               0,38 10537240    4963641 /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.57.24.102

$ rpm -q --queryformat='%{SOURCERPM}
' $(rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.57.24.102)
ffmpeg-3.0.2-79.3.src.rpm

What do they use then? ffmpeg?

I noticed when cleaning .cache/gstreamer-1.0, watching video in firefox did not create it.

Bo

Yes, ffmpeg.