[SOLVED] QupZilla 1.8.9 won't playback YouTube videos even with all the GStreamer plugins installed.
GentooThis forum is for the discussion of Gentoo Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
QupZilla 1.8.9 won't playback YouTube videos even with all the GStreamer plugins installed.
I've tried emerging QupZilla a number of times now, and everything I can find on this issue suggests that it's an issue with not having enough GStreamer plugins.
But YouTube, Dailymotion, and any other major video website I try fails with some kind of "encountered a problem" message and a bunch of fake static displayed as if you tried to play an out-of-region video. All the player controls work and I know HTML5 video works. But nothing will play back on YouTube.
I've emerged every GStreamer plugin I can think of, but the problem just isn't getting any better. I just can't find the functionality needed to play YouTube videos, and I've recompiled QupZilla 15 times already after poking around and trying to add libraries that might be helpful to it.
Last edited by athenian200; 05-22-2016 at 12:46 AM.
There's nothing by that name specifically, but I have gst-plugins-libav-1.6.3 which I assume is the same thing. Actually, I found a list of plugins I've already installed...
Browsers are one of the toughest things to build from source, IMO. They have a tendency to be missing a lot of important functionality unless you know exactly what you're doing and how to tell it to use some specific library rather than just compiling itself without support for something basic because it's technically not a dependency. I've never had good luck with this.. sigh. I don't even know where to start figuring out what the developers intended for me to do here to get this working.
I'm still just getting "An error occurred. Please try again later." no matter what I pull in to try and make it work.
Well, I don't know exactly what libraries I needed, but I did find the core of my problem. It was twofold.
The first problem is that I kept recompiling the Qt5 version of QtWebKit every time I installed a new library, but QupZilla was using a version of Qt4 that I wasn't even touching. So I did something I'm probably not supposed to do, and modified the QupZilla ebuild to use Qt5 instead of Qt4, and manually overrode the checksum verification with the --digest flag. This actually made the application look a lot better in terms of font rendering, etc, and the developers specifically recommend using the latest version of QtWebKit you can get your hands on.
That only solved half the problem, though. I tried adding "gstreamer" to my USE flags, and it told me that QtWebKit it could only support one of "multimedia," "gstreamer," or "gstreamer010," but not all three at once. I'd had multimedia in the USE flags before, and that was preventing it from using GStreamer. So I rebuilt QtWebKit one more time after removing "multimedia" and adding "gstreamer," and now YouTube videos work.
But seriously, this was tough to figure out. You essentially have to know that QtWebKit can be built against one of three mutually exclusive multimedia frameworks, and that QupZilla only works properly when QtWebKit is configured with one of those options. How many people out there know that? Probably not many.
Ant that's why you should probably report it at bugs.gentoo.org, so that A) it can get improved and B) people having the same problem can actually find the info.
One suggestion: it seems to me like you directly edited the ebuild. If you don't want it to get replaced on the next sync, you should create a local overlay and put your modded copy in it, so that it doesn't get touched by portage sync.
Sorry, it just didn't occur to me that this was a bug. I just thought this application was so picky and ridiculous that you just had to mess with it a lot to get it working. I'm so used to doing stuff like this that I just take it for granted that things will go wrong and I'll have to go through logs and swap out packages hoping to get the right cocktail of dependencies.
Incidentally, I did discover that there's a combination of USE flags you can use that prevent you from having to edit the ebuild... the combination is:
gstreamer qt5 -qt4
You have to explicitly tell Portage to favor Qt5 over Qt4 before it will actually use Qt5 to build the package. I'll get over there and see if the Gentoo developers think this is worth their time. Thanks.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.
