Bugzilla – Bug 1102793
Recent chromium/ffmpeg update kills multimedia playback in firefox
Last modified: 2018-07-27 07:01:35 UTC
After installing ffmpeg4 libraries (4.0.1) and chromium (67.0.3396.99-lp150.2.3.3) from update I can no longer watch video playback on sites as npo.nl and nos.nl. This is probably related to ffmpeg4 not being in packman yet, but I would expect that firefox would still be able to use the older ffmpeg. Reverting the chromium update and removing the ffmpeg4 files (libavcodec58 etc) resolves this issue and video playback is working again. Probably the consequence of https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1095545
Same issue with Leap 42.3. After removing latest Chromium and the new FFmpeg4 packages Firefox can play videos, but now I am not able to use Chromium. Downgrading Chromium is not a good choice as it means I would be missing security fixes mentioned in https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1095545#c30
I have not tried reloading "firefox". However for me, almost all of the updates came from the packman repo (except "libsodium23" and "chromium"). That's perhaps because I set the packman repo to priority 97 (compared to 99 for opensuse repos). I'm rebooting shortly (for other reasons). I'll test firefox after the reboot.
I have now restarted firefox. And twitter videos do not play. Previously they played in firefox but not in chromium or opera. Now they do not play anywhere, as far as I can tell. They still won't play in firefox or opera. I have not checked vivaldi, but they probably won't play there either. Marking this bug as confirmed.
I am unsure what could be done on the Firefox side to mitigate that. The "right" solution would be that packman provides a libavcodec58 package IMHO. In Firefox I could introduce dirty hacks only like - remove (aka patch out) support for 58 - change order of looking up libavcodec versions to prefer 57 (and 56) before 58 I still would very much prefer the first option.
See bug 1102671 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1102671 ***