1380427 - Most recent version, 54.0.1, will not update Widevine and will not play Widevine streaming movies. I found a way to fix, but you need to know about this problem.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)

Description

[Jeri Reed]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Build ID: 20170628075643

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to play a Swank movie that needs the Widevine plug-in, it would not play. After contacting our library person for help, I realized I needed Widevine. She instructed me to try Chrome, and movie played in Chrome. Attempted to download Widevine from a google link she sent that was provided by Swank I believe, got an error message that Firefox would not install because file was corrupt. But when I looked at my browser plug-ins, Widevine was already there, but last update listed was October 2016. Searched web and Mozilla Support, could not find anything, but did find similar issue with movies and followed those instructions, removing widevine folder from browser profile, which I did. 


Actual results:

Movie wouldn't play. When folder containing Widevine was removed, and there was not a copy of plug-in available, there was a message saying to try later, Firefox was going to download Widevine--but it never did, waited over night and still same message and no Widevine. Tried to play the movie again--and message on top of screen that said Firefox was downloading Widevine, it did download, and movie played.


Expected results:

Movie should have played, I have never had this problem, believe this is from newest version of Firefox as I could not find anything on web about it, or in Mozilla Support. I had to tell my online students to watch using Chrome, while this is a fixable problem, I am not going to try to explain to all of them how to do this to fix. It was easy to fix once I figured out how to do it but took a long time and there was no info on how to fix it. Biggest problem is that newest version of Firefox does not update Widevine and will not actually download a new copy after it is removed unless you are actually trying to play something that needs it, and not sure everyone will figure this out.

Comment 1

[Jeri Reed]

Swank streaming media markets to colleges, and there are many who use this, I regularly use these films and many of us, and students use Firefox. It would be nice if this would be fixed some how, students are going to have to use another browser otherwise, just too complicated to try to explain to many online students who have different levels of computer skill.

Comment 2

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

Jeri - if you have man in the middle software such as VertoAnalytics (or perhaps Antivirus) then you should take a look at bug 1300633.

Bug 1267495 fixes the issue but doesn't cover updates.

Chris - we need to figure out a plan to handle updates.

Comment 3

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

(In reply to Anthony Jones (:kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e) from comment #2)
> Chris - we need to figure out a plan to handle updates.

Yes.

Comment 4

[Bulk Bug Changes for mreavy's org]

Mass change P1->P2 to align with new Mozilla triage process

Comment 5

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

James,
Do you know if this is still a problem now?

Comment 6

[James Cheng[:JamesCheng]]

I don't know much. According to comment2 and comment3, our fallback mechanism only apply on fetching widevine CDM that user did not download CDM yet.

So the problem still exists.

Comment 7

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Moving to p3 because no activity for at least 1 year(s).
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage for more information