Opensuse-provided Chromium and Firefox don't play mp4 music videos anymore.

English Multimedia
1

I’m not sure when this problem started. I have collection of ‘music’ mp4 videos, created from a sequential set of camera-recorded ‘mts’ files. May are also uploaded to Youtube. Google Chrome, downloaded and installed as a Google RPM, plays them fine- both from youtube and opening the local file. (Youtube is likely not using ‘mp4’ in those streaming cases, likely switching to vp9 or even av1). VLC media player still plays them all without “issues”.

I forced Tumbleweed ‘Firefox’ to re-install from Yast2 GUI ‘software management’. I also tried from a newly created profile. When started from a command line, Firefox issues an error possibly regarding the build environment:

Missing chrome or resource URL: resource://gre/modules/UpdateListener.sys.mjs

The error on opening the file occurs in two versions, depending on whether metadata is present with the audio track (metadata is valid):

Could not open input file: “…/2022-09-remembrance-incline-youtube-test.mp4”
[Child 29597, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fa749589500 state=DECODING_METADATA Decode metadata failed, shutting down decoder: file /home/abuild/rpmbuild/BUILD/firefox-104.
0.2/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:370
[Child 29597, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fa749589500 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_METADATA_ERR (0x806e0006) - static mozilla::MP4Metadata::ResultAndByteBuffer mozill
a::MP4Metadata::Metadata(mozilla::ByteStream*): Cannot parse metadata: file /home/abuild/rpmbuild/BUILD/firefox-104.0.2/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:151

or, with just one message for the case of no metadata present at all:

Could not open input file: “…/2022-09-remembrance-incline-youtube-test-metadata-stripped.mp4”
[Child 3605, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fdc45e58200 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - mozilla::MediaResult mozilla::FFmpegDataDecoder<59>::InitDecoder(): Couldn’t open avcodec: file /home/abuild/rpmbuild/BUILD/firefox-104.0.2/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:151

I did not try to investigate Chromium behavior in a similar way. I just downloaded and installed Google’s own ‘Chrome Browser’ RPM. The local files all work, and I can also play the same videos from my youtube channel with no issues. Here is the URL for one of those same files hosted by youtube: https://youtu.be/WgM9v0PS4tU

2

Firefox needs ffmpeg4 (and it’s dependencies) to be installed from the Packman repository.

Not familiar with Chromium, but that may well solve the issue there as well.

Edit: also, what repository are you installing FF from?

3

Packman versions solved the problem. (I had messed up my repository priorities in a recent install.)

Thanks for the reminder, I should have checked that first.

4

The MP4/H.264 Video SDB is here → <https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Firefox_MP4/H.264_Video_Support>
You need, from Packman or, VLC, the following packages, possibly with version numbers greater than 58 (for Leap 15.4, the version 56 libraries are no longer available) –

  • libavcodec56
  • libavcodec57
  • libavcodec58
  • libavformat56
  • libavformat57
  • libavformat58
  • libavdevice56
  • libavdevice57
  • libavdevice58

[HR][/HR]BTW, thanks for the tip – I see that, the version 59 libraries are now available …