1693914 - I can't play live videos on YouTube (problem with live transmission) - Ubuntu 18.04.5

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Piotr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Steps to reproduce:

Simply I can't play video from this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg

I have problem only with "live video" on youtube. I don't have problem with playing normal youtube video. Only problems with live stream.

I don't have any extension in firefox. Default configuration. I have this same problem on newer version of Ubuntu - 20.04 LTS

Actual results:

I can't play any live video from YouTube website.

I check debugger from youtube and this is output:

"debug_error": {
"errorCode": "html5.unsupportedlive",
"errorMessage": "Ten format wideo nie jest obsługiwany.",
"Nx": "HTML5_NO_AVAILABLE_FORMATS_FALLBACK",

Expected results:

I should play any video on YouTube website. I can do this on my other machine with Lubuntu 18.04.5 operating system.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Do you have any ffmpeg installed in your Ubuntu? If live video is encoded in H264, then Firefox on Linux would need ffmpeg to decode H264 video because of the proprietary issue.

Comment 3

[Piotr]

(In reply to Alastor Wu [:alwu] from comment #2)

Do you have any ffmpeg installed in your Ubuntu? If live video is encoded in H264, then Firefox on Linux would need ffmpeg to decode H264 video because of the proprietary issue.

I have default configuration for Ubuntu. I didn't install any additional packages. How I can check if I have or not ffmpeg? Can you tell me package name what I need? Next I report this issue also on Launchpad and some people told me that on Firefox 85.0.2 they can play this video so this is strange thing. If it is true this mean that this can be problem with 85.0.1. Now we don't have 85.0.2 version of firefox on repository yet.

If you will tell me name of package what is need to play video I can check on other machine when I can play this live video. On this machine I have also Ubuntu but with other environment.

Comment 4

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

ffmpeg is the package name, and simply typing $ ffmpeg should be enough, to see if you have it or not. If you've installed that before, you should be able to see its version and some desciption. Only on Linux, Firefox needs to utilize an external player (ffmpeg) to decode H264/AAC, which are proprietary codecs. On other platforms (Windows/MacOS/Android), they provides the default codec to allow Firefox to decode them.

Comment 5

[Piotr]

I don't have this package but I found that in my another computer with other operating system with Linux core I also have not this package but my firefox works fine and I can play this video so I don't know what is the problem.

Comment 6

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Can you confirm that, in another computer (which you said no package but works fine), the live video you watch is decoded by H264? That can be checked by clicking stats for nerds in Youtube video, and see the codecs part.

Comment 7

[Piotr]

I checked and I used command in terminal $ ffmpeg. I don't have ffmpeg package but I found that on other linux machine I have packages which are from ffmpeg "family". I mean that i have installed libavcodec57, libavdevice57 and others libav packages. So how my firefox works on this machine if I have only libavcodec 57 without ffmpeg package? On Ubuntu 18.04.5 I don't have these packages so this is maybe reason to my problem with YouTube live transmission.

This live video which I can't play on Ubuntu have codecs mp4a. I checked with stats for nerds.

Comment 8

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my previous comment. The thing we actually need is libavcodec which is usually bundled with ffmpeg. As your another linux machine has that shared library, that is why it can play the video. So after you install the libavcodec in your Ubuntu, you would be able to watch H264/AAC media.

Therefore, I will close this bug because the issue would be fixed after installing libavcodec. If that doesn't work, feel free to reopen the bug.

Comment 9

[Piotr]

I can confirm that this problem was because I had not installed libavcodec57. After installation everything works fine. Thank you very much Mr Alastor Wu [:alwu] for help :)