Hello folks, Since a couple of months, Firefox fails to play some videos; it's not clear to me what the pattern is. Some samples that fail to play: (The topics discussed in those posts are unrelated to my problem; I just grabbed the first links I found where the issue happens) https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/20/Himitsu.html https://old.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/vkleei/twnvidia_drivers_firefox_f... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/viq6pu/oc_doit_a_todo_manager_that_y... OTOH YouTube videos play fine, and this video from drewdevault.com also plays fine: https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/01/Porting-DOOM-to-Helios.html Here is a smoking gun found when launching Firefox from a terminal; this message pops up everytime I visit a page that contains a video that does not play:
[Child 17299, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7f705ba71f00 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-101.0.1/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:3587
IIUC from FFmpegDataDecoder.h, that <59> refers to the libavcodec version Firefox wants to open; that led me to observe that libavcodec59 is absent from the videolan.org repository: http://download.videolan.org/SuSE/Tumbleweed/x86_64/ As hinted in the subject, I use that repository, according to the procedures described here: https://en.opensuse.org/VLC https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html And indeed: $ zypper search -si libavcodec Loading repository data... Reading installed packages... S | Name | Type | Version | Arch | Repository ---+------------------------+---------+-----------+--------+---------------------- i+ | libavcodec58_134 | package | 4.4.2-4.1 | x86_64 | VLC i | libavcodec58_134-32bit | package | 4.4.2-4.1 | x86_64 | VLC i | libavcodec59 | package | 5.0.1-1.7 | x86_64 | Main Repository (OSS) i | libavcodec59 | package | 5.0.1-1.7 | x86_64 | openSUSE-20210422-0 So at this stage, I have a couple of questions: (1) Is this an actual issue with the videolan.org repository, or is there no reason the absence of libavcodec59 in that repository should prevent Firefox from playing videos? (2) Should I switch over to the Packman repository? AV codecs are the only reason I am messing with repositories on my system in the first place, so I feel like the videolan.org repo is more appropriate since IIUC the Packman repo has a much broader scope…? FWIW I'm getting the impression that my issue is somewhat similar to: * this one, reported on forums.opensuse.org in April 2022: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/568822-firefox-having-problems-wi... … where IIUC one user solved their problem by ensuring libavcodec59 is reinstalled from the Packman repository. * bug#1199210, which suggests switching to the Packman repository: https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1199210 Though it is noted that "you should only switch the ffmpeg packages and not everything to packman. (And set the priority of the repo lower.)", reinforcing my sentiment that ideally I'd want to stay with the videolan.org repository… Let me know if I should provide more information in order to better qualify my problem. Thanks for your time.