1646683 - Netflix and PrimeVideo.com streams do not work with Firefox when application pathname contains certain non-ASCII characters

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Paul Crawford]

Attachment: Netflix- Streaming Error With Firefox Mac; 2020-06-18 {§}.png

{Please note that these details were originally provided as my added Comments in another user's recent Bug 1612407 - Primevideo.com not playing videos. That bug has since been closed, since the OP's issue under Linux has been resolved, along with a recommendation from Bryce Seager van Dyk (:bryce) that I open a new incident report for macOS. I've tried to lay out this description in a better organised way.}

Preliminaries

My location and subscriptions {although location probably doesn't affect this issue}:

• Currently residing in Georgetown, Guyana.
• Recent subscriber to two worldwide streaming services: (1) Netflix's website ("auto-locating"); and, (2) Amazon's international Prime Video website. {For what it's worth, I'm accessing both of them in the "straight" way, i.e., not via a VPN.}

My setup:

• Classic Mac Pro (Mid 2012) 6-core tower, with 48 GB RAM and a GTX 680 graphics card. {Note that, in terms of system architecture, the 2012 towers are practically identical to the 2010 ones.}
• macOS 10.13.6 'High Sierra' (Build 17G13035).
• Firefox Mac {currently 77.0.1 (64-bit), with Widevine CDM 4.10.1582.2}.

What did you do? (steps to reproduce)

• Signed into the Netflix international website, then attempted to view a movie or TV-series episode.
• Signed into the Prime Video website, then did the same.

What happened? (actual results)

• On the Netflix website, a new alert page appeared (modelled on a classic CRT TV Set), containing:- a large caption "Pardon the interruption"; the message "This title is not available to watch instantly. Please try another title."; the (presumably error) number '-1044' below that; 'Netflix Home' & 'Learn More' buttons below that; and finally, the text "| Error Code F7121-1331" at the bottom.
• On the Prime Video website, an alert box popped up, entitled "Video Unavailable", containing:- the message "We're experiencing a problem playing this video. For assistance, please go to www.primevideo.com/help."; and, a 'Close Player' button below that.

What should have happened? (expected results)

On both websites, the video streaming should have proceeded normally.

My related troubleshooting attempts

• Tried several approaches — (A) disabling Enhanced Tracking Protection, and third-party ad-blocking & anti-tracking extensions; (B) re-starting in Safe Mode (i.e., with Add-ons Disabled); and, (C) creating a brand new profile — but all to no avail.
• Also tried (the Mac equivalent of) using the two special Firefox environment variables mentioned in Bug 1496607 - Netflix no longer streams due to CDM verification being blocked by sandbox > Comment 30 — i.e., using the Terminal's shell to enable these two flags before launching the 'firefox' exec, but again to no avail.

What happens with other browsers {=> mixed results}

• Safari 13: Unfortunately, can't work for most DRM'd video streaming websites on my older Mac, since Safari's current FairPlay CDM / HTML5 Video support apparently requires newer CPUs with Trusted Execution Environment capability, and of course there's also no longer support for fallback NPAPI plug-ins such as Silverlight.
  • On the Netflix website, this typically results in a redirection to the Help page 'Netflix system requirements for HTML5 Player and Silverlight', with a special banner added at the top, containing:- the greeting "Hi, <my profile name>"; the message "Looks like you are having trouble watching Netflix"; and, a separate block below that, enclosing (at the left) a Caution sign, the heading "HTML 5" & the text "Netflix Error F7121-1331", along with (at the right) a bright-red link "Get Help".
  • On the Prime Video website, this typically results in a black page with a small "Unsupported plug-in" message in the middle.
• Chromium-based browsers {with bundled Widevine CDMs}: Yay! Fortunately, DRM'd video streaming does work fine for me with such browsers — e.g., the latest Opera Mac {currently 68.0.3618.165, with Widevine CDM 4.10.1610.0}.

Other notes

• In (at least) one of my VirtualBox virtual machines that I use for development testing, which is also running macOS 10.13.6 'High Sierra' as the guest OS, it turns out that Firefox Mac does play streams from both Netflix and Prime Video! {However, Safari still does not.}
• Of course, in that particular VBox VM, video tends to be choppy and audio is usually AWOL, but at least the streaming itself is supported in Firefox just fine.

Wrap up

So, the issue does seem to be related to the detection or reporting of system capabilities, by either Firefox Mac or these two video streaming services.

Anyway, at the moment I'm using the (now Chromium-based) Opera Mac browser just for Netflix and Prime Video streaming.

Comment 1

[Paul Crawford]

Attachment: Prime Video- Streaming Error; 2020-06-18 {§}.png

Comment 2

[Paul Crawford]

Well, after some more testing, it seems that this issue is actually due to the presence of certain triggering characters in the application path. It turned out that the VM environment (where the video streaming worked) was a red herring, since in that case I'd happened to install Firefox Mac in the default location (the 'Applications' folder on the VM's boot volume).

I'm sorry it just hadn't occurred to me before that I could be experiencing another form of an earlier problem that I'd reported, and was fixed {Bug 1514437 - Crash on startup when application pathname contains certain non-ASCII characters}. It looks now as if somewhere in Firefox Mac's DRM / Video processing there's another text-encoding issue with the app's path?

Anyway, I'm at least somewhat happy to report that once I move the Firefox app into a location whose path does not have any problematic chars, then both Netflix and Prime Video streams do work just fine under macOS 10.13 'High Sierra' on my older Mac Pro tower. :-) So, as discussed in that earlier bug report, once again this is not exactly a showstopper issue (as there's a straightforward workaround once you realise what's happening), but it would be nice not to have to worry about which chars are in the Firefox app's path.

{For now though, I think I'll still keep using the Opera Mac browser for video streaming as I've become accustomed to it.}

Comment 3

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

(In reply to Paul Crawford from comment #2)

Well, after some more testing, it seems that this issue is actually due to the presence of certain triggering characters in the application path. It turned out that the VM environment (where the video streaming worked) was a red herring, since in that case I'd happened to install Firefox Mac in the default location (the 'Applications' folder on the VM's boot volume).

I'm sorry it just hadn't occurred to me before that I could be experiencing another form of an earlier problem that I'd reported, and was fixed {Bug 1514437 - Crash on startup when application pathname contains certain non-ASCII characters}. It looks now as if somewhere in Firefox Mac's DRM / Video processing there's another text-encoding issue with the app's path?

Anyway, I'm at least somewhat happy to report that once I move the Firefox app into a location whose path does not have any problematic chars, then both Netflix and Prime Video streams do work just fine under macOS 10.13 'High Sierra' on my older Mac Pro tower. :-) So, as discussed in that earlier bug report, once again this is not exactly a showstopper issue (as there's a straightforward workaround once you realise what's happening), but it would be nice not to have to worry about which chars are in the Firefox app's path.

{For now though, I think I'll still keep using the Opera Mac browser for video streaming as I've become accustomed to it.}

Could you provide an example of the specific path name that was causes issues? It would be ensure we reproduce the issue correctly.

Comment 4

[Paul Crawford]

Thanks for your attention, it's much appreciated.

From my limited tests this time around, the video streaming issue occurs when Firefox Mac's application path contains any of (at least) the same relatively unusual chars mentioned in that earlier fixed incident {Bug 1514437}, viz.:

• '»' (U+00BB, or Option-Shift-\ on a Mac)
• 'µ' (U+00B5, or Option-m on a Mac)
• '°' (U+00B0, or Option-Shift-8 on a Mac)

As soon as that earlier crash was resolved, I'd just gratefully moved my Firefox application back into its old location (whose path contains instances of one of those triggering chars), and then promptly forgot all about it. I guess that's why it took me a while to even consider a connection between the two situations.

[As to why my preferred location for Firefox Mac happens to contain such chars, well, it's kind of a long & geeky story going all the way back to a bug in Mac OS X v10.6 'Snow Leopard' (2009). For my own developer tests, etc., I have several boot volumes/partitions with various macOS versions, including even old 'Snow Leopard'. I usually install programs onto a separate non-boot volume, and each program often has multiple versions so that the relevant compatible one could run when accessed from a particular boot volume. Within a program's folder, I used to group those multiple versions into a sub-folder named '<ProgramName> {Editions}' and sub-sub-folders named '{For Mac OS X 10.<minor>}'. Unfortunately though, 'Snow Leopard' has a bug whereby locations with paths containing braces ('{' & '}') are not correctly escaped when dragged into a Terminal shell window. That made me start either eliminating braces entirely or substituting other paired chars for them, and in the latter case I just ended up often using chevrons ('«' & '»') with which I was already familiar from OSA / AppleScript.]

Comment 5

[Augusto Pace]

Hi,

I'm setting component to Core - Audio/Video: Playback for someone to take a look at this issue.

Thanks.

Comment 6

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Bug 1668372 is another GMP path handling bug and while working on that I figured I'd test this. This doesn't seem to repro on Windows (prior to or after applying my changes in bug 1668372) if I use a profile dir with the characters from comment 4 in its path. This suggests that something in our MacOS code is specifically unhappy.