On 7/2/2022 7:10, Kévin Le Gouguec wrote:

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:

CCing reply to support@ since this isn't really a good topic for factory@.

(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?

libavcodec59 from OSS repo is doesn't include a bunch of codecs with patent issues, so I would expect it to not be able to decode everything.

(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…?

If you want libavcodec59 with all the codecs then it appears this is what you must do since the VLC repo doesn't offer it. BTW, this is precisely why Packman was partitioned: if you only want libavcodec etc and don't need to worry about games etc then you can just add the "Essentials" Packman repo.

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…

This advice is probably of the "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" variety. What you have is working besides libavcodec etc, so only change libavcodec etc and leave anything else as is. Of course you could try switching all available packages over to Packman essentials, but I'd make a note of all that was switched (or use btrfs or something) in order to undo if you experience further issues. -- Jason Craig