#57 H.264 not working in Firefox on Silverblue
Closed 3 years ago by tpopela. Opened 5 years ago by zlopez.

Hi,

according to https://www.youtube.com/html5 Firefox on Silverblue doesn't have H.264 support.
So I installed gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 and mozilla-openh264 and still no luck.

This is the output of rpm-ostree status

State: idle
AutomaticUpdates: disabled
Deployments:
● ostree://fedora-workstation:fedora/29/x86_64/silverblue
                   Version: 29.20181112.0 (2018-11-12T00:58:12Z)
                BaseCommit: b7c7432244c32f1d85442be323ae60ee0a8973b74aa8f856a3e911e90a61f97b
              GPGSignature: Valid signature by 5A03B4DD8254ECA02FDA1637A20AA56B429476B4
           LayeredPackages: ansible cherrytree gnome-tweak-tool gobby gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 krb5-workstation libvirt mozilla-openh264 powerline-fonts vagrant vagrant-libvirt vagrant-sshfs
             LocalPackages: nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fc10.x86_64 redhat-internal-cert-install-0.1-7.el7.csb.noarch

  ostree://fedora-workstation:fedora/29/x86_64/silverblue
                   Version: 29.20181109.0 (2018-11-09T01:33:51Z)
                BaseCommit: 8eb384ed07a1c68a89125a7c3e84befcd0e806b41afd5446ffd2e0d4d1759cd4
              GPGSignature: Valid signature by 5A03B4DD8254ECA02FDA1637A20AA56B429476B4
           LayeredPackages: ansible cherrytree gnome-tweak-tool gobby gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 krb5-workstation libvirt mozilla-openh264 powerline-fonts vagrant vagrant-libvirt vagrant-sshfs
             LocalPackages: nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fc10.x86_64 redhat-internal-cert-install-0.1-7.el7.csb.noarch

Is there something I'm missing perhaps?


Firefox switched from gstreamer to ffmpeg a while back and sadly you need to get the codecs from rpmfusion now to get this working.

@kalev
How can user, who is not good with command line, can obtain ffmpeg?

Just curious, because I'm still looking on Silverblue as OS for those, who are not very good with PC and don't want to use command line.

I think you'll need to drop to the command line to install this on Silverblue right now :( Needing ffmpeg for firefox is a pain point, definitely, and both for Silverblue and regular Fedora.

https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?317721-fedora-28-and-firefox-video(h264-youtube-gstreamer1) has instructions for dnf; I think they should work if you replace 'dnf' with 'rpm-ostree install'

It's working, but you need to do restart after rpmfusion rpm is installed. So this is not optimal. :-(

Firefox switched from gstreamer to ffmpeg a while back and sadly you need to get the codecs from rpmfusion now to get this working.

This is unfortunate. Was this something we decided to inherit in Fedora. Could we switch it back? What would the pros/cons be?

Firefox switched from gstreamer to ffmpeg a while back and sadly you need to get the codecs from rpmfusion now to get this working.

This is unfortunate. Was this something we decided to inherit in Fedora. Could we switch it back? What would the pros/cons be?

I don't know, that's a question to the firefox maintainers. @stransky @xhorak

Yes, you need ffmpeg. Mozilla switched to ffmpeg from gstreamer due to gstreamer issues/bugs.

It can be surely switched back if anybody is going to work on that - what's the main problem here, as usually :)

I tried it again after some time and the Firefox is still not playing some videos out of the box. I tried https://vimeo.com/ and I'm just getting Player Error.

I also tried the flatpak version of Firefox, which unfortunatelly has the same issue.

So right now on Silverblue you can't play plenty of videos on net until you layer some packages, which is not nice.

If you're comfortable running the FirefoxNightly or FirefoxDev editions there exists an un-official flatpak repository:

https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

Both are built with support for the Codecs that live within the flatpak ecosystem.

Personally I run the dev edition without any issues (it doesn't update nightly and is much closer to the stable branch i think).... it works quite well and all the codecs seem to run fine out of the box. Plus it's a flatpak!

I think eventually Firefox will release an official flatpak of their very own, but for now this is what works without having to fiddle with layers and rpm-ostree :)

You might also have some luck talking to the un-official maintainers and asking them to build us a "stable" branch that includes support for the codecs .... personally, I think the demand is definitely there.

Right now I will wait till the Firefox will be officially released on Flathub.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-Flatpak-Almost-Stable

This is discussed as this Fedora Workstation WG issue: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/126

This is discussed as this Fedora Workstation WG issue: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/126

That issue doesn't mention flatpak. What you're saying is the solution to that issue would also solve the problem for the firefox flatpak too?

That issue doesn't mention flatpak. What you're saying is the solution to that issue would also solve the problem for the firefox flatpak too?

Yes, it will (as the Firefox Flatpak (the least the Fedora one) is created from Fedora packages).

I'm closing this as once we have a solution for Workstation it will solve the Silverblue problems as well. See https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/126 for Workstation issue.

Metadata Update from @tpopela:
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

3 years ago

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