1203605 - OpenH264 plugin constantly reports that it "will be installed shortly"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Audio/Video: GMP, defect)

Description

[Tyler]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2015-09-10 23-08-59.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150827193320

Steps to reproduce:

I did a reinstall of my Arch Linux 64bit and installed Firefox. So everything is new and fresh.


Actual results:

On a new, clean profile, the Plugins section of about:addons lists the
"OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc." with a yellow
background, and indicates "Will be installed shortly".

However, restarting Firefox (or the whole computer, for that matter) does not
result in the plugin changing state.

Changing between "Always activate" and "Never activate" does not seem to have
any effect either.

about:plugins lists the plugin, though it does not indicate any file, path
(both empty) or version (reported as being "null").


Expected results:

OpenH264 plugin should be installed.

Comment 1

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

The download of the OpenH264 GMP should be initiated about 1 minute after the browser is started. Could you check if the state is still the same about 5 minutes after starting Firefox and report back? Thanks!

Comment 2

[Tyler]

(In reply to Stephen A Pohl [:spohl] from comment #1)
> The download of the OpenH264 GMP should be initiated about 1 minute after
> the browser is started. Could you check if the state is still the same about
> 5 minutes after starting Firefox and report back? Thanks!

The state had been the same after hours. finally I just gave up and deleted the whole ~/.mozilla folder and it's installed automatically within minutes. I guess this is a workaround but have no idea why it's happening to a newly installed firefox.

Comment 3

[Dan Minor [:dminor]]

This sounds like a problem with the plugin download code, not openh264 itself. Given the age of the bug, I'm going to mark it as incomplete.

Comment 4

[TerryL]

I am having the exact same issue as first reported by tftylerfoo. I have also deleted the whole ~/.mozilla folder to no effect.
I have a Raspberry Pi 3B running a Raspbian version "Buster" with a new install of Firefox 68.9.0-esr.1. Can anyone help to solve the problem with "no download" of the OpenH264 plug-in? I might add, I even started an account with Mozilla to see if that would start the download operation but this did nothing to make it happen either.