Cannot play live video, and non-live video is partially broken on some websites
Categories
(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)
Tracking
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| firefox147 | --- | affected |
People
(Reporter: babolivier, Unassigned)
References
Details
I'm running Nightly (147.0a1 (2025-11-17) (64-bit) as of writing) on Arch Linux (Wayland + PipeWire) with latest updates applied.
Back in ~mid-October I noticed I wasn't able to play live video from multiple websites (YouTube, Twitch, ccc.de, etc.), the players all show me an error saying my browser cannot play the video. On most sites (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Instagram, or a small landing page I've got with a single <video> tag) videos play but with no audio. On some websites (AirMo, PeerTube) videos don't play at all (PeerTube shows manifestIncompatibleCodecsError). Only YouTube seems to work correctly for non-live video.
I can reproduce this in troubleshooting mode as well.
The issue has been there for about a month now, and at the time (when I asked in #firefox on Slack) I saw mentions that using a new profile might help. I've been procrastinating on this a bit, but I've recreated my profile today, and the problem still persists.
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Comment 1•2 months ago
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Would you be willing to try mozregression to see if there was a specific regression between September and now:
https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/quickstart.html
Thanks!
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Comment 2•2 months ago
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Also, and probably do this first, could you try the latest nightly which includes the fix from bug 1995035 (build 20251121093802) which should resolve a Linux specific syscall/sandboxing issue.
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Reporter | |
Comment 3•2 months ago
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Ah sorry, I forgot to have a go at mozregression.
After tinkering a bit more (mozregression didn't help as builds from over a year ago were also failing), it looks like an incompatible ffmpeg dependency. I installed nightly from a tarball so it would be updated with the built-in updater (rather than my package manager), so I didn't keep up with the packaging changes of the main ArchLinux firefox package. I installed that package to test, which installed the required dependencies, and it worked. It looks like was made to strictly depend on ffmpeg4.4 after the ArchLinux repos updated ffmpeg to version 8.0 which Firefox doesn't support yet (bug 1962139): https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/firefox/-/issues/19
After restarting, nightly seems to pick up the alternative ffmpeg version and play videos correctly, so I'll go ahead and close this (assuming WONTFIX is the correct resolution in this case, feel free to update if not). Thanks for the help with troubleshooting!
Description
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