1133634 - mp4-encoded YouTube & Vimeo videos are entirely black, on linux

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:
 1. Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaYMoTi2g8

ACTUAL RESULTS:
Audio plays, but the video remains black. If I try to seek around in the video, it's still entirely black. I can hear audio, but there's no video playing.

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Video should play.

(Note that the first ~1 second is supposed to be fully black, before the logo swoops into view.)

REGRESSION RANGE FROM MOZREGRESSION:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=888760868216&tochange=ab6236affc72

--> caused by Bug 981869, which blacklisted a gstreamer plugin.

Platform: 64-bit Linux
Firefox Version: 38.0a1 (2015-02-16)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

Edwin, any suggested workarounds?  Based on "risks" from bug 981869 comment 28, it sounds like this outcome wasn't anticipated.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

OS version: Ubuntu 14.10 (64-bit)

Comment 2

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

Hmm, maybe the audio track on the video is MP3. Should have no shortage of MP3 decoders on Ubuntu though.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

The audio plays just fine -- only the video is black.

Also: FWIW, I can successfully play these videos:
 Firefox ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtOGa5M8AuU
 Rickroll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
 Simon's Cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZPN9g2pmPQ
 Soul Pancake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm-T3HCa618
 Frozen Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLzfXQSPBOg
 PewDiePie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8
 John Oliver "RadioShack" bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FCioWz7aps

But these ones play with a fully-black video area:
 John Oliver "Tobacco" bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8
 SNL Celeb Jeopardy bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaYMoTi2g8

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Sorry, I had the wrong URL for the PewDiePie video -- I mis-pasted the broken John Oliver video URL there.

All the videos listed in comment 3 are playing with the HTML5 player, fwiw. (both before & after the regression)  If I right-click them, there's an "About the HTML5 Player" entry in the context menu.

"Stats for nerds" context-menu entry shows that all the working ones have a  WebM / VP9 mime type, whereas the broken ones have this mime type:
> video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2"

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Two more data points:
 - Disabling the pref "media.gstreamer.enable-blacklist" does NOT fix this bug. (despite my expectations). This pref was created in bug 981869, the bug that caused this regression. (That makes me wonder slightly if that pref is actually behaving as-expected.)

 - Disabling the pref "media.gstreamer.enabled" *does* fix this bug. (This seems to make YouTube serve me a *working* VP8/vorbis video stream instead of mp4, for both broken videos.)

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I also get a black video area when playing https://vimeo.com/7660200 .  (same regression range as the YouTube issue)

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

DOM inspector for that vimeo video shows this <video> tag:
<video poster="" src="https://avvimeo-a.akamaihd.net/59120/093/11991274.mp4?token2=1424208487_4cb48ba797beb29132ebe0bd17f511d2&amp;aksessionid=6249e4128701cc6a&amp;ns=4" preload="" x-webkit-airplay="allow"></video>

...whereas before the regression I see this instead:
<object data="https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/flideo/1.0.3b10/flideo.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="100%" width="100%"><param value="ready=flideo_1424207210466.flashReady" name="flashvars"><param value="https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/flideo/1.0.3b10/flideo.swf" name="movie"><param value="true" name="allowfullscreen"><param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess"><param value="#000000" name="bgcolor"><param value="opaque" name="wmode"><param value="high" name="quality"><param value="noscale" name="scalemode"></object>

So at least in the vimeo case, it seems like part of the issue is that they're serving flash to pre-regression builds and a mp4 to post-regression builds. I'm not sure what's going on there, and I'm not 100% sure that this change coincides with bug 981869's landing.  (As noted in comment 6, though, I did verify that the fully-black-vimeo-video *does* start with bug 981869's landing, via mozregression.)

Comment 8

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

Before that rev, youtube serves vp8. With the rev, it serves mp4. I wonder if something broke in CanPlayType().

Comment 9

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

Attachment: 1133634.patch

So, the patch in bug 981869 tried to move some of the filtering from FactoryFilter() into IsPluginFeatureBlacklisted(), which didn't really make any sense.

Comment 10

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/83725be2772e

Comment 11

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/83725be2772e

Comment 12

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

Edwin - As per your comment in bug 981869, this bug impacts 37 as well. Can you please request uplift for Beta 4 (gtb Mon, Mar 9)?

Comment 13

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

Comment on attachment 8565788 [details] [diff] [review]
1133634.patch

Approval Request Comment
[Feature/regressing bug #]: Bug 981869
[User impact if declined]: Video playback not working on Linux
[Describe test coverage new/current, TreeHerder]: In m-c since Friday 2015-02-18 PST
[Risks and why]: Video playback not working for many Linux users
[String/UUID change made/needed]: None

Comment 14

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

Comment on attachment 8565788 [details] [diff] [review]
1133634.patch

Video playback is a current priority. This fix has been on m-c/m-a for two weeks. Let's take the fix in Beta 4. Beta+

Comment 15

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/2c20766b4493

Comment 16

[[SV Manager] Florin Mezei, QA (:FlorinMezei)]

We could not reproduce the original issue. Exploratory testing for Audio and Video on Firefox 37 Beta 4 revealed no new issues. 

Removing the "qe-verify" flag as it seems there's nothing more for us to do here.

Comment 17

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

dveditz, why is this status-firefox-esr31:affected?

This was a regression from bug 981869, whose patch AFAICT hasn't landed on ESR 31.

Comment 18

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(FWIW: I can't reproduce this in latest ESR31 release (31.5.3), but don't read too much into that, because I also can't reproduce with the Nightly that I used to file this bug in comment 0. So I suspect that means I got an update to the gstreamer thing that we blacklisted in the regressing bug.

Still, I don't see any reason to suspect ESR is affected, per comment 17.)

Comment 19

[Benjamin Kerensa [:bkerensa]]

We will need Daniel's weigh in here.

Comment 20

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I suppose bug 981869 comment 42 answers my question in comment 17 here. (Looks like we'll be backporting bug 981869 to esr31, which means we need to backport this bug's patch as well.)

needinfo=edwin for the uplift request (I guess)

Comment 21

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #17)
> dveditz, why is this status-firefox-esr31:affected?
> 
> This was a regression from bug 981869, whose patch AFAICT hasn't landed on
> ESR 31.

bug 981869 was tracked for ESR31 and I wanted to make sure this one didn't get missed along with it.

Comment 22

[Edwin Flores [inactive from 2016-12-01] [:eflores] [:edwin]]

Comment on attachment 8565788 [details] [diff] [review]
1133634.patch

Approval request comment in comment 13

Comment 23

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-esr31/rev/7a0092a7bf48

Comment 24

[Petruta Horea [:phorea], Desktop Test Engineering]

I could reproduce using Nightly 38.0a1 2015-02-16 on a single Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit machine (out of for) and only with the vimeo link from comment 6.
The vimeo video is correctly played on Firefox 37RC, latest Dev Edition 38.0a2 and 31.6.0 ESR.

Based on this and on comment 18, I'm marking this as verified. Also there were no new issues on this.