1150544 - H.264 support broken in 37.0 and 38.0a2 on Linux amd64

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[jon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150330004006

Steps to reproduce:

I installed Firefox 38 from the official Dev Edition builds and attempted to play H.264 video in the browser on YouTube and Imgur.


Actual results:

Videos would fail to play back on YouTube, and http://youtube.com/html5 reported that my browser didn't support H.264 at all.  Imgur "gifv" wrappers would attempt to fall back to Flash, but fail even when Flash is installed, leaving a white rectangle.  Various other attempts to play H.264 video failed.  I confirmed that this was a regression by testing H.264 video support via GStreamer in Iceweasel 31 on the same machine, which worked.  Chromium also worked with H.264 video.


Expected results:

H.264 video should have been played correctly.  Additionally, Linux distributions already ship better performing, truly Free Software implementations of H.264 accessible through GStreamer, so I fail to understand why OpenH264 is necessary at all on Linux builds.

Comment 1

[jon]

This bug is also present in Iceweasel 37 from Debian's experimental repository on the same machine, which has OpenH264 enabled, although YouTube can at least detect the presence of H.264 support, if not H.264+MSE support.  I suspect that OpenH264 is at fault here.

Comment 2

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

The official build uses gstreamer-0.10 but this will be changing to 1.0 soon. MSE is not supported by the gstreamer backend.

Comment 3

[bull500]

(In reply to jon from comment #0)
> Videos would fail to play back on YouTube, and http://youtube.com/html5 reported that my browser didn't support H.264 at all.

You need the right GStreamer packages installed on your system for proper H264 support. Have both 0.10 and 1.0 versions installed.

Comment 4

[bull500]

(In reply to Anthony Jones (:kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e) from comment #2)
> The official build uses gstreamer-0.10 but this will be changing to 1.0
> soon. MSE is not supported by the gstreamer backend.
 
There are playback issue with H.264 video's on YouTube; 
Its never smooth and always choppy buffering, DASH is always disabled and the codec used for playback is "avc 1.42001e mp4a.40.2"

Comment 5

[jon]

(In reply to bull500 from comment #3)

> You need the right GStreamer packages installed on your system for proper
> H264 support. Have both 0.10 and 1.0 versions installed.

I do.  I have the H.264-providing packages gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer1.0-libav installed, AND I have the OpenH264 plugin enabled.

Comment 6

[bull500]

(In reply to jon from comment #5)
> (In reply to bull500 from comment #3)
> 
> > You need the right GStreamer packages installed on your system for proper
> > H264 support. Have both 0.10 and 1.0 versions installed.
> 
> I do.  I have the H.264-providing packages gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and
> gstreamer1.0-libav installed, AND I have the OpenH264 plugin enabled.

These are the ones i have on my system - not exactly sure what package specifically enables this feature though. OpenH264 is only for Firefox Hello(WebRTC) and not for video playback if im not wrong.

gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.31-13.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.36-12.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-espeak-0.4.0-5.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-0.10.23-24.fc21.i686
gstreamer-ffmpeg-0.10.13-14.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-libav-1.4.3-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugins-base-1.4.5-1.fc21.i686
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld-1.4.3-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugins-base-1.4.5-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugins-good-1.4.5-2.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-0.10.23-24.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-bad-0.10.23-6.fc21.x86_64
PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin-1.0.4-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-tools-0.10.36-11.fc21.x86_64
libnice-gstreamer1-0.1.7-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.19-18.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.36-12.fc21.i686
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-1.4.5-2.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-1.4.3-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer-0.10.36-11.fc21.i686
gstreamer1-1.4.5-1.fc21.x86_64
gstreamer1-1.4.5-1.fc21.i686
gstreamer-0.10.36-11.fc21.x86_64

Comment 7

[bull500]

Can someone point out the right packages gstreamer packages required for playback support on the official Firefox help pages? 
Many are getting confused on whats actually needed.

Comment 8

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

Bull is correct in comment #6 that OpenH264 doesn't (currently) support mp4 playback for html video, it's only used for WebRTC.

As far as playback not working, it sounds like Firefox isn't finding decoders on the system. So you might need to install elements supporting playback, under gstreamer 0.10 for official Firefox builds. You could also be hitting the block on h264parse. Now that Debian has shipped a fix for that issue it's possible they can remove the block in iceweasel.

Comment 9

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

(In reply to bull500 from comment #7)
> Can someone point out the right packages gstreamer packages required for
> playback support on the official Firefox help pages? 
> Many are getting confused on whats actually needed.

I use the fluendo codecs. They seem to work fine. http://fluendo.com/oneplay/oneplay-codec-pack/

Because of the patent issues around h.264 and AAC the question of what codecs one can use is complex is dependent on one's jurisdiction.

Comment 10

[bull500]

> I use the fluendo codecs. They seem to work fine.
> http://fluendo.com/oneplay/oneplay-codec-pack/
> 
> Because of the patent issues around h.264 and AAC the question of what
> codecs one can use is complex is dependent on one's jurisdiction.

Ah patents that's true :( ; Most people tend to get gstreamer onto their systems, a place to know what dependencies are needed would be nice and helpful

Comment 11

[jon]

This problem is actually getting WORSE in Firefox 39.  This screenshot was taken from a fresh download of FF39.0a2 with a clean profile on Debian 8.0 amd64:

http://i.imgur.com/LlFr117.png

No MSE, no H.264.  I know for a fact that the H.264 libraries are in the right place since Iceweasel 31 on this system shows as supporting H.264 on this URL.  Does Mozilla do any QA at all on Linux anymore, or should I just switch to a browser that actually gives a damn about my chosen platform?

Comment 12

[bull500]

> No MSE, no H.264.  I know for a fact that the H.264 libraries are in the
> right place since Iceweasel 31 on this system shows as supporting H.264 on
> this URL.  Does Mozilla do any QA at all on Linux anymore, or should I just
> switch to a browser that actually gives a damn about my chosen platform?

MSE is yet to be enabled by default on Linux. You could try it out by enabling in about:config
media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.exposed
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.gmp.enabled
WebM is still under development but you can try it out by enabling media.mediasource.webm.enabled

I'm not sure why you h264 option is unavailable to you.
On my Fedora Linux 20 H264 is enabled, so maybe your problem could be specific to the distro.
Ensure you have the gstreamer0.10 and gstreamer1 files and dependencies installed correctly. 
Verify - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1150544#c6

Comment 13

[jon]

Thanks for pointing out those fragmented-mp4 about:config flags.  They fixed the problem, now I get H.264 and MSE for all codecs on http://youtube.com/html5 and in actual use.  I definitely recommend Mozilla set these flags by default for Firefox 40 on Linux in Dev Edition or Beta to get some more testing exposure.