using Firefox 78.0.2 on Xubuntu 18.04 (last upgraded 4 days ago) logged to twitter.com i am looking at a promoted video among the tweets. i did right-click with the mouse. the video pauses and a small box pops up with "Copy video address". while holding the mouse button down i move the pointer into that box and release the button to select it. then in a terminal window with a bash shell running i middle-click the 3-button mouse to paste in the video address and i get what was originally copied into the mouse buffer. i tried a lot of variations but none work. i've had many other websites fail like this, before. it seems every site doing a custom copy will fail. does anyone know why? am i doing this wrong (it works fine for plain text)?

I would think if the context menu has an option to copy the URL, you should:
1. right-click to display the context menu...(click, not click-and-hold)
2. move the pointer to that entry in the menu and click the left button.
...that should put the URL into the buffer.
3. go to your terminal and middle-button click to paste.

i've tried that. same issue ... the previous buffer content gets pasted. i do the hold first because for many places, the menu goes away when the button is released.

that video went away. is was an ad for Ritz crackers that i wanted to replay if it would really download and was compatible. right-click brought up only the choice to get the video address.

Can you past with ctrl-V into address bar of a new tab, or into a GUI text editor?

I’ve not completely figured out when or how (or if) the two buffers sync up...the middle click one and the ctrl-V one, but I suspect the copy from the context menu is going into the ctrl-V buffer.

i'll try that when i get a chance.

i do know the buffer is not real and that the data comes from the source application each time it is pasted. maybe there is an issue with Xorg not becoming aware of a new source as a result of the copy being done.

got a new ad with a video so i tried that. it worked! Ctrl-V pasted a URL into the URL input of a new tab. i let it run and it brought up a twitter page with the video in it. it went back and tried the mouse middle button, again, and it pasted the previous content. so there must be at least two buffers or two source locators, however this is being done. it make me more worried about Firefox, now.

It’s not just Firefox. It seems to be the difference between the GUI ctrl-C/ctrl-V sequence and the cli/terminal highlight copy/middle mouse paste. Definitely different buffers.

It's an old story; Xorg uses two clipboards: the "primary" and the "clipboard". Firefox' right-click => copy URL action uses the clipboard, middle-click uses primary.

Solution:
either use a terminal that can paste from clipboard (e.g. Ctrl-Shift-v) or use a clipboard manager that can sync both clipboards and/or copy entries from one to the other.

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for now i'll just ^V into a new tab URL space, highlight that new URL, paste it in the terminal. in this case i got to see that this address really just gets a twitter page of the ad (that includes the same video), instead of the raw video i had hoped for (such as an .mp4).

- it is possible that future versions of firefox (or an addon) will restrict copied text leaking into the primary buffer

- mpv + youtube-dl can play videos from tweets

This sounds like something I've encountered. I've cut/copied something from an editor, switched to the browser window and tried to copy a video URL/URL-at-the-current-time and paste it into VLC only to get the text I copied in the editor. [scratches head]

Thanks to those who've identified that there are two(!) (why?) clipboards being used. Seems crazy.

Cheers...

I also copy links via right click from firefox. I then use "shift + insert" to paste the buffer into the terminal. This works in FVWM. I do not know if this method depends on the window manager but you could give it a try.

i'd guess because of 2 different implementors making their own ways to do things. it could be a Firefox thing because it is trying to behave consistent between Microsoft Windows and POSIX systems like Linux or Unix.

No, that's not the reason at all.
I looked it up the other day, and when you read about it it actually makes a lot of sense. In a nutshell: implicit selection vs. explicit selection.

I recommend everyone to install a clipboard manager and stop worrying their pretty head.

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this problem does not exist outside of Firefox. so ... why is Firefox not using these implicit and explicit clipboards just the same way their host platform does? why should Firefox need a clipboard manager? why can't Firefox just "do the right thing"?