1526735 - "Firefox is installing components needed to play the audio or video" always appears

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1524830

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

Description

[Roy Wellington]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

If I browse to netflix.com (any page, including the login/show selection pages) I get a yellow banner "Firefox is installing components needed to play the audio or video on this page. Please try again later."

I have seen this in past versions of Firefox; the components typically install quickly, and refreshing the page causes the banner to disappear.

I see the Widevine plugin listed under "Plugins" on about:addons. Unlike this attachment1 from a previous bug, I do NOT see a yellow warning about "Widevine … will be installed shortly."; that is, it appears to be fully installed. I have Widevine v1.4.8.1008.

Other bugs have had issues where the bug reporter has an /etc/hosts file that is blocking domains, causing the plugin download to fail. I do NOT have such a file. (The only two entries in my /etc/hosts file are for localhost.)

I am not on a "weird" network, such as a corporate WiFi network; I'm at home, with Comcast. Access to the Internet should be unrestricted.

I attempted to "wipe" my profile by moving ~/.mozilla/firefox to ~/.mozilla/firefox.borked ; the browser, upon being relaunched, appears to have used a blank profile, welcoming to Firefox. However, the issue persists.

Bug reports I found Googling suggested toggling the "Play DRM" setting off and back on. I tried this (toggled off, restart Firefox. Attempt to browse to Netflix. Get warning that I must enable setting to play content, click the enable button. Same notice about install components), but had no luck.

Gentoo Linux, x86_64
Firefox: "Firefox Quantum" "Extended Support Release" 60.5.0esr (64-bit)
Widevine: v1.4.8.1008

This was working on this machine in a previous version of Firefox. I just upgraded to Firefox 60.5.0 from 60.4.0.

Actual results:

The banner never goes away. Refreshing just continually gets the same banner and the same message about installing components.

Expected results:

The components should have installed within a reasonable time, and refreshing the page caused Netflix to play.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

Probably a duplicate of bug 1524830. What is your update channel setting? It can normally be found like this:

1. Type about:support into the address bar.
2. Under the Application Basics category near the top, note the value of Update Channel.

Comment 2

[Roy Wellington]

Attachment: update-channel.png

Under the Application Basics category near the top, note the value of Update Channel.

I don't seem to have an "Update Channel" entry on that screen. I've attached a screenshot, so that you can see this as well.

If that value would be in regards to auto-updates, I wonder if this is an artifact of it being from Gentoo Linux; while I know Firefox handle updates / self-updates on other platforms such as OS X and Windows, my installation under Gentoo Linux receives updates via the system package manager, portage.

Probably a duplicate of bug 1524830.

That bug seems very promising; the symptoms appear identical, and I also get the yellow bar repeatedly on the bitmovin.com URL in that bug.

One of the things I found in my search that people seemed to think worked was ensuring that the Widevine plugin was up to date. However, I found no way to update it in about:addons — so, that bug's theory that we're receiving the wrong version sound plausible to me.

I see no reason to not close this bug as a duplicate of 1524830.

Comment 3

[Roy Wellington]

Reading further in that bug, is sounds like this is perhaps a compile-time problem, that MOZ_UPDATE_CHANNEL channel is not appropriately set?

I scanned through the ebuild (the script/file that details how to build Firefox under Gentoo's portage package manager) and I don't see any reference to it. However, would that cause it to be "default" when it should be "esr"? (Am I barking up the right tree?)

I can also report this against Gentoo, too (especially if it isn't a problem w/ upstream Firefox).

Comment 4

[Gingerbread Man]

(In reply to Roy Wellington from comment #2)

I don't seem to have an "Update Channel" entry on that screen.

Please try this instead:

1. Exit Firefox.
2. In a text editor, open the following file:
   <Firefox installation folder>/defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js
3. If the file contents don't say pref("app.update.channel", "esr"); change that line accordingly, then save and close the file.

If that line isn't set to esr, then this is definitely a duplicate of bug 1524830.

Comment 5

[Roy Wellington]

They do not; that file says

pref("app.update.channel", "default");

Changing it was successful! The yellow banner happened for a moment, then disappeared, as expected. Netflix appears to work now, as well. The Widevine plugin now shows as being v4.10.1196.0.

Does this channel-prefs.js file get its content set to "default"/"esr" as the result of a build-time flag/option? If yes, are you able to point me at what that might be? I.e., if the root cause of this and bug 1524830 is that a build-time flag is wrong in both Debian and Gentoo, I presume that will have to be fixed in those distributions independently, since they use different build systems. I tried meddling around with Gentoo's ebuild to see if that was the case, but I haven't had any luck yet. (And I don't know what flag, if any, controls this.) It would be helpful to know, s.t. if I file a bug against Gentoo, I can ideally include exactly what needs to change.

Comment 6

[Roy Wellington]

(This is somewhat for my notes, in case I forget before morning and my pending build of FF succeeds.)

This email, linked in bug 1524830, is most helpful: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?att=1;bug=921381;filename=0001-Switch-to-ESR-update-channel-for-GMP-downloads.patch;msg=10

In particular, I think that's the flag I need to ensure gets set. Documentation for the mozcoreconf eclass: https://devmanual.gentoo.org/eclass-reference/mozcoreconf-v4.eclass/index.html

(I've put together a patched ebuild. If it succeeds in building a working Firefox, then I'll see about sending this to the Gentoo bug tracker.)

Comment 7

[Roy Wellington]

My patched ebuild appears to work.

Reported against Gentoo: https://bugs.gentoo.org/677722

Comment 8

[Gingerbread Man]

Thank you for the update. It appears you've already answered your own questions, so I'll just mark this as a duplicate of bug 1524830 as discussed previously.