1830627 - Unable to play m3u8 embedded videos (application/x-mpegURL), from LaPresse.ca or Bloomberg, on some computers

Status: UNCONFIRMED

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

Description

[Jeff Fortin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

Visit any article containing a video on LaPresse.ca, such as https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/sciences/2023-04-28/costa-rica/les-paresseux-porteurs-de-l-antibiotique-du-futur.php

Actual results:

Under the article's title, just above the article's byline/abstract, Firefox shows a black rectangle, without the ability to play the video that should be shown there.

I tried disabling uBlock (in part or entirely), fully enabling video autoplay, enabling cookies, disabling Firefox's Advanced Tracking Protection, etc. nothing works. I think it's not a user configuration problem on my end at this point... particularly, opening the web developer tool, I was able to find this hint today, the console has a warning printed in it:

Specified "type" attribute of "application/x-mpegURL" is not supported. Load of media resource https://bellvps1.content.video.llnw.net/smedia/e1b3e24ecb944abd8f4ed823a0b76ddc/Km/_LMa6T6OQpzwQLLUd48qUIxlvV3naNjpuM1peKWoI/les_paresseux_du_costa_rica_porteurs_de_-644c22db475d6936c496c91f_apr_28_2023_20_09_02-123e0dded24fe347d0af589506b7685ea01b2621.m3u8 failed

Expected results:

Ability to show, load and play the video on my desktop computers. Note that I am running the stock Firefox package provided by Fedora 38, not the flatpak version.

Other browsers I've tried (Chromium and "GNOME Web" / Epiphany) are able to play that page's video without problems on the same computer / OS. It would be good if Firefox can handle those m3u8 things as well, because LaPresse is probably the most popular news outlet in my country, so it reflects badly on Firefox if it's the only browser that can't play videos there.

Comment 1

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

This is playing for me on Windows. Might be a Linux specific issue. Can you post your about:support text?

Comment 2

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: about:support output from a desktop workstation, where the video does not work

Comment 3

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: about:support from a computer where those videos work

I have tested further again, and one of my computers is somehow able to play those videos... yet it has the same operating system, browser, and apparently the same config, as the others. Here is its about:support output.

Comparing this file to the other (using Meld), I have so far not been able to see significant differences, other than hardware video decoding acceleration—but I have another laptop that has the same chipset and video decoding acceleration capabilities as this one, that is still unable to show and play the video in the linked page.

The only difference I see so far is that the laptop that can play this does not show the Specified "type" attribute of "application/x-mpegURL" is not supported error in the web dev console...

Comment 4

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: about:support output from a 2nd laptop, where the video does not work

Comment 5

[Jeff Fortin]

Interestingly, the video/page used as a test case in bug #1345605, i.e. this Bloomberg article, also exhibits the same behavior as what I'm seeing on the lapresse article:

• It works on one of my laptops, but not on my desktop computer nor my other laptop.
• The only difference between the Bloomberg article and the LaPresse article, is that the unplayable video on the Bloomberg article shows its poster image, whereas the unplayable video on the LaPresse article only shows a black rectangle without a poster image.

The other bug reports I've found (bug #1345605 and bug #1720498) all ended up with people no longer being able to reproduce the issue eventually, but I believe that might be due to using different computers, possibly. I'm unfortunately not able to contact the reporters/commenters of those tickets to bring their attention to this new investigation here...

Comment 6

[Jeff Fortin]

...also, from searching around outside this bugzilla, I found these, but came to no conclusive answer: issue #83 in videojs/http-streaming and issue #1401 in videojs/videojs-contrib-hls which made me found these two demo pages: VideoJS HLS demo that does not work on ANY of my computers (including the one that would be able to play the Bloomberg and LaPresse videos) and the videojs-http-streaming Demo that works on ALL computers (even the ones that are unable to play the Bloomberg and LaPresse videos)

So I am presuming VideoJS / the websites are not to blame here, something odd might be going on in Firefox itself, especially since it behaves differently from one computer to the next on those news articles' videos?

Comment 7

[Andrew Osmond [:aosmond] (he/him)]

I'm unable to reproduce the original issue myself with LaPresse, but given it is consistently reproducible for you, let's start with collecting some logs. If you run Firefox from the command line with MOZ_LOG="HTMLMediaElement:5,HTMLMediaElementEvents:5,MediaControl:5,MediaResource:5,MediaStream:5,MediaDecoder:5,MediaFormatReader:5,MediaDemuxer:5,MediaManager:5,MediaStreamTrack:5,MediaTrackGraph:5,EME:5,GMP:5,HLS:5,RemoteDecode:5,MediaSource:5,MP4Metadata:5,PlatformDecoderModule:5" firefox or similar, can you collect the output and attach it to the bug? Just browse to LaPresse, try to play the video, and exit.

If you could do this for the failing and succeeding machines that would be great. Bonus points for attaching separate logs for the Bloomberg cases.

Comment 8

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: Requested debug output, on a laptop where the videos are not working

Thank you for the turnkey instructions! Here is the output of that command. I took the liberty of spacing things out a little with some "NOTE: " annotations to identify what happens in which part.

Comment 9

[Jeff Fortin]

Just for clarity: note that unlike the reporter in bug #1830597, YouTube videos work fine for me (as do videos pretty much everywhere), whether as VP9 or when forcing them to play back as H.264. The LaPresse and Bloomberg videos, however, have never worked on "those computers where they don't work", that's not something new with Fedora 38. Videos on Vimeo also work fine, for instance.

Comment 10

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jimm, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 11

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

In the failing case, under the Rendering failure log I see -

(#0) Error: glxtest: VA-API test failed: failed to initialise VAAPI connection.

For hardware decoding support, we are only getting software -

Codec Support Information: H264 SW VP8 SW VP9 SW AV1 SW Theora SW AAC SW FLAC SW MP3 SW Opus SW Vorbis SW Wave SW

On the machine that works, there are no rendering failures, and codec support shows decoding hardware detected -

Codec Support Information: H264 SW H264 HW VP8 SW VP8 HW VP9 SW VP9 HW AV1 SW Theora SW AAC SW FLAC SW MP3 SW Opus SW Vorbis SW Wave SW

Looks like this might be va-api issue on the failing device?

Comment 12

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

(In reply to Jim Mathies [:jimm] from comment #11)

In the failing case, under the Rendering failure log I see -

(#0) Error: glxtest: VA-API test failed: failed to initialise VAAPI connection.

For hardware decoding support, we are only getting software -

Codec Support Information: H264 SW VP8 SW VP9 SW AV1 SW Theora SW AAC SW FLAC SW MP3 SW Opus SW Vorbis SW Wave SW

On the machine that works, there are no rendering failures, and codec support shows decoding hardware detected -

Codec Support Information: H264 SW H264 HW VP8 SW VP8 HW VP9 SW VP9 HW AV1 SW Theora SW AAC SW FLAC SW MP3 SW Opus SW Vorbis SW Wave SW

Looks like this might be va-api issue on the failing device?

Fedora ships OpenH264 decoder by default which is broken.
If you install ffmpeg from rpmfusion both HW and SW decode works flawlessly .
This is a distro issue with missing correct ffmpeg decoder AFAIK.

There's Fedora/video how-to page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration#Video_decoding

Comment 13

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

So please follow the instructions above and try to install libavcodec-freeworld package. The the video should play fine. If you want HW accelerated playback you need to install additional packaged (intel drivers and mesa-va-drivers-freeworld).

Comment 14

[Jeff Fortin]

Indeed I had seen that Fedora wiki page, it has been my reference for a long time and I had even contributed some edits to it :)

libavcodec-freeworld is already installed on all my computers (including the F39 desktop computer with open source AMD graphics and the F38 laptop computer with Intel graphics, both computers where the issue still occurs), so that doesn't seem to be the cause.

Comment 15

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: Requested debug output, on another laptop (T480) where the videos are not working

Another debug log output, when loading the La Presse example article above, on a ThinkPad T480 (Intel Kabylake graphics). Currently still running Firefox 117 because 118.0.1 is not yet available in the Fedora 38/39 repositories, but I doubt 118.x would change anything here.