[DONE] Facebook Videos in Firefox

[drichard58]

I have contacted Mozilla as I think this is a FireFox Issue, but have not made any progress, so I thought I would ask here in case someone else has run into this.

I am running Mageia 5 and Firefox 52.5.3. When I use Firefox to go to sites like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc., The videos and audio play fine. However, no matter what video I pick from Facebook, the video plays, but there is no audio. Here's what I have done so far:

1. Cleared the cache and re-started Firefox
2. Created a brand new profile in Firefox
3. Disabled all the extensions & add-ons in Firefox
4. Tried Chrome to play the same Facebook videos.

In all cases (except #4) I can play the Facebook video, but no audio comes out. When I use Chrome, the videos play with no issues (video & audio).

I went to a site called https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html (recommended by Firefox support) and tested the video/audio. As indicated on the site, MP4 is not supported by Firefox and is the only sample video that did not play correctly.

I don't like Chrome because of all the information that it collects and shares with sponsors/other sites. So I would rather use Firefox. I use Thunderbird for e-mail/calendar and it integrates with Firefox well.

Any suggestions?

[dbg]

While playing the FB videos did you check audio volume in kmix or pulseaudio volume control? Sometimes they get muted.

[doktor5000]

As indicated on the site, MP4 is not supported by Firefox and is the only sample video that did not play correctly.

There's nothing that Mozilla can do about that, unless you directly use one of the builds from Mozilla.

You're probably missing some gstreamer codecs like gstreamer1.0-faad and gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad and/or the tainted repo version of some library.
Please show the output of

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urpmq --list-media active --list-url
rpm -qa|sort|grep gstreamer

See e.g. https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15043 or https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16316
Or one of the various previous topics about this issue: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=11049 or viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10870 or viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10433

[drichard58]

1. I did check the volume settings and they all appear to be enabled - Pulse Audio, main volume on desktop, and the volume setting in the video window.
2. I had seen some of the information you suggested, doktor5000, but from my limited understanding of what was being said, it sounded like they were having audio issues for any video. For me, it's only the videos in Facebook and only in Firefox. If I use Firefox to play YouTube or any other videos, it seems to work fine. If I use Google Chrome to play the Facebook videos, they play fine also. I did run the two commands you suggested and I do not have the tainted enabled and there are a few of the files listed in those links that I am missing. Maybe I just need to enable the tainted files?

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Core Release cdrom://x86_64/media/core
Nonfree Release cdrom://x86_64/media/nonfree
Core Release2 https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/x86_64/media/core/release
Core Updates https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/x86_64/media/core/updates
Nonfree Release2 https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/x86_64/media/nonfree/release
Nonfree Updates https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/x86_64/media/nonfree/updates
Core 32bit Release https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/i586/media/core/release
Core 32bit Updates https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/i586/media/core/updates
Nonfree 32bit Release https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/i586/media/nonfree/release
Nonfree 32bit Updates https://mirror.netcologne.de/mageia/distrib/5/i586/media/nonfree/updates

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gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-0.10.36-9.2.mga5
gstreamer0.10-pulse-0.10.31-9.2.mga5
gstreamer0.10-tools-0.10.36-12.mga5
gstreamer1.0-libav-1.4.3-4.mga5
gstreamer1.0-plugins-base-1.4.3-2.2.mga5
gstreamer1.0-pulse-1.4.3-2.2.mga5
gstreamer1.0-tools-1.4.3-2.1.mga5
lib64gstreamer0.10_0-0.10.36-12.mga5
lib64gstreamer1.0_0-1.4.3-2.1.mga5
lib64gstreamer-plugins-base0.10_0-0.10.36-9.2.mga5
lib64gstreamer-plugins-base1.0_0-1.4.3-2.2.mga5
packagekit-gstreamer-plugin-1.0.6-0.4.1.mga5

[doktor5000]

Maybe I just need to enable the tainted files?

Yes, then best run urpmi --auto-update or a regular update afterwards, it should pull in quite a number of tainted packages.

Depending on the audio codec of the facebook videos you mentioned you may afterwards still need to install gstreamer1.0-faad as mentioned previously.

[drichard58]

You da Man, Doktor5000!

Installing the tainted updates did the trick.

So, one last query - what exactly is meant when they call them "tainted"?

[doktor5000]

Well, that is what the repository is called. See https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mirrors_policy#tainted