[Solved] Mageia10 Alpha & Firefox VLC Youtube Video

[gregM]

Trying Mageia10 Alpha and my firefox and vlc fail to play video especially youtube.

First I noticed Firefox in ISO didn't play Video
Did a bunch of looking at settings and codec support, hardware acceleration, sandbox settings, Remote Process , FFmpeg pkg checking with my AI assistant.

Nothing seemed to get a youtube video to play.

So thought to try VLC to see what it was like.

VLC in the ISO seems to be v3.0.23, which is perhaps has no supported youtube.luac or youtube.lua support.
I tried a couple of different youtube.lua files/versions but didnt get VLC to work.
Suggestions seem to be that V4 of VLC might be required
So didnt get the VLC version in the ISO to work

Code: Select all

In /usr/lib64/vlc/lua/playlist
Renamed ISO supplied youtube.luac to youtube.luac-old

Replaced the supplied youtube.luac with  3 different .lua file
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/videolan/vlc/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua -o youtube.lua
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/videolan/vlc/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua -o youtube.lua
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/master/support/vlc/youtube.lua -o youtube.lua



Even with the yt-dip rpm installed I didn't get V3.0.23 of VLC to play youtube videos.

The next suggestion was to try mvp & SmPlayer.
mvp seems to be an offshoot of mplayer and the Smplayer is a GUI front end, the suggestion was that it would play youtube without some of the problems of VLC.
Installed them and it worked fine ...Youtube Video played.

So back to Firefox and the last suggestion was to check the Remote Processes and examine the result of this command

Code: Select all

 ldd /usr/lib64/firefox/libxul.so | grep -E "avcodec|avformat|avutil|dav1d|vpx|openh264|opus|vorbis"


Result :-

Code: Select all

        libvpx.so.11 => /lib64/libvpx.so.11 (0x00007f8070c00000)


My AI assistant got a bit hyper at this result and said :-
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Firefox is not linked to ANY of the FFmpeg libraries
No:
libavcodec
libavformat
libavutil
libdav1d
libopus
libvorbis
libopenh264
Only libvpx.

This is catastrophic for media playback.
It explains everything you’ve been seeing.

Firefox on Mageia 10 Alpha was built without FFmpeg support.

This is not a configuration issue.
This is not a codec issue.
This is not a sandbox issue.
This is not a profile issue.
This is not a GPU issue.

This is a broken Firefox build.

A Firefox binary that is not linked to FFmpeg cannot:

decode H.264
decode AAC
decode MP4
decode WebM audio
decode Opus
decode Vorbis
decode AV1 (software)
decode anything except VP8/VP9 video
And YouTube requires H.264 + AAC for almost all content.

So Firefox loads the page but cannot decode the video, even though the codec table claims support.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

A packaging bug it was suggested.
As my fooling about are to test the Mageia10 Alpha ISO these might be valid observations.

The other thing that seemed to happen is that the Sound & Video KDE menu items were not populated with the VLC or SmPlayer rpm pkg additions.
[Edit] The newly added items showed up in that menu at next logon [/Edit]

Perhaps some of this report is of some use, and not just noise.

FWIW I did ask AI for comparisons on Linux Distros that had very recent kernels, Plasma and it gave a few suggestions, Fedora, Suse, Debian etc..
No mention of Mageia.
Then I asked it to compare the feature set of Mageia10 and it reported a very favourable comparison to its own suggestions.
So thanks to the developers of the upcoming release version of Mageia10.

[sturmvogel]

Do you have the tainted repos enabled and the proper codecs installed?

[gregM]

Tainted was not enabled. So that might have been part of the problem.
But I have just enabled tainted and updated anything listed
There were a bunch of VLC and FFMPEG and associated lib files showing in the Updates list from the tainted repo.
Now System reports up to date.

As both appear in Core and Tainted, should I remove the Core versions of those rpms ?
Actually just checked and it seem installing the tainted versions, removed the Core ones, so ignore that last question!

Opening VLC reveals no change.. and refuses to play from youtube as does firefox.

Both however will play NON youtube videos.

All formats at this site will play on both players.
https://test-videos.co.uk/
AV1 - MP4
H.264 - MP4
VP9 - WEBM
H.264 - MKV

So it appears the codecs and formats used are installed and available to the players, but the youtube elements is the problem
Thanks for you input.

removed quote. ~Germ

[daniewicz]

I am also running Mageia 10 alpha.

Firefox does run youtube videos for me.

After opening firefox, go to Settings.

Scroll down to DRM content and enable

[gregM]

Thanks for the reply,
have DRM enabled and restarted F/Fox but no joy... Was enabled actually so removed the rpm, reinstalled .. checked DRM was enabled .. No change, also tried with & without performance settings (hardware acceleration) ..Neither setting made any difference..

Also for something different tried running Firefox from an expanded.tat.xz download from firefox.com .. It also did not play YouTube vids..
Must be something odd in my setup I guess, but the Mageia10 is just a play space not an everyday work space will fool about some more..
VLC also doesn't do YouTube either..it reports Lua error can't descrambler YouTube throttling Url parameters: data transfer will get throttled access error: HTTP error 403,

Have tried different YouTube .lua and .luac files but on V3.0.23 didn't get one that fixed it.

[gregM]

Mysteriously Firefox started playing youtube videos and Im not 100% sure why

While investigating the VLC player issue and getting the yt-dlp youtube downloader integrated, (install yt-dlp, install nodejs.rpm, create ~/.local/share/vlc & yt-dlp conf files) I thought to check the sound card server setting as at one time the video played without sound.

I had Piperwire with Wireplumber selected, and it may have been misbehaving as testing/adjusting the sound level I didn't hear any sound..
So I changed it to pulseaudio ...

Next boot sound setting seemed to be good and I heard sounds when adjusting the volume level.
I got VLC to start playing youtube with the yt-dlp and nodejs java runtime...
Then went back to firefox and mysteriously youtube videos were working!

I tried to find out what it was that had changed, removed the nodejs, yt-dlp but firefox kept working with youtube.
I suspect it was a broken audio confiuration that fixed the firefox issue, as I now remember a similar experience I had some time back...

So In 2023 here was the same issue I had, so I should have gone there first I think!
https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=14912

All good now, and must try to remember what broke firefox video playback, in the past, especially youtube ones.
I may have also missed noticing the test videos (not youtube), that appeared to work in Firefox (while youtube ones just stalled), from https://test-videos.co.uk/ did not play sounds, as I was just so pleased the video bit was animated/working

[daniewicz]

Glad you got it working.