Firefox on Linux cannot view H264 video without FFmpeg
Categories
(Core :: WebRTC: Audio/Video, defect, P3)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: btham, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
This issue is in the context of the Webex web app (I am a Webex developer), but I assume this affects other applications using H264 as well.
To summarize, in a Webex meeting, I cannot view other people's video feed without installing FFmpeg. I have tested and observed this issue on Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS. (In CentOS, the entire tab crashes.) For Ubuntu and Fedora, following the steps here allows me to see other people's video: https://help.webex.com/en-us/WBX9000032830/Video-Receiving-Issues-on-Firefox-for-Linux. On CentOS, after installing FFmpeg via the following commands, I am able to see other people's video:
• sudo yum install epel-release yum-utils
• sudo yum-config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools
• sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo=https://negativo17.org/repos/epel-multimedia.repo
• sudo yum install ffmpeg
The Webex web app uses WebRTC. Going to about:addons confirms that the OpenH264 video codec is installed and activated.
After installing FFmpeg, deleting openh264-lib (which FFmpeg installs) from my machine causes the issue to occur again.
Although I am reporting that this issue occurs on Firefox 68, I have also tried more recent versions of Firefox and have encountered the same issue.
This question on Ask Ubuntu is probably asking something similar: https://askubuntu.com/questions/389437/how-do-i-get-html5-h-264-video-working-on-firefox
Actual results:
On Ubuntu/Fedora, I cannot see other people's video without installing FFmpeg. On CentOS, the entire tab crashes.
Expected results:
I see other people's video (without needing to install FFmpeg).
I should note I'm running these Linux distributions in VirtualBox (I don't have physical Linux machines). Not sure if that makes a difference.
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Updated•5 years ago
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Comment 2•5 years ago
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I would have expected this to work, using Open264. Nils, what's the expectation here, who is working on that ?
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Comment 3•5 years ago
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We did some work a while ago to add support for hardware h.264 decoding where available. I'm guessing that at some point we've broken the fallback to the software decoder.
Description
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