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On a new Slackware 14.2 installation, I can't get Firefox to play H264/MP4 videos.
This website with test videos gives me an error ("No video with supported format and MIME type found") for the H.264/MP4 video, while the others (WebM and Ogg/Theora) work.
Youtube's HTML5 support page confirms that H.264 and MSE & H.264 are not supported (though Youtube videos work, probably with WebM).
In a Gentoo forum, people say it may be related to a problem with Firefox loading a bad libavcodec library. In my system I have a libavcodec.so.57 library, compiled from source with H.264 support, according to the relevant line from "ffmpeg -codecs":
(I wondered if this was more a Software or a Slackware thread, I thought the problem is more of a generic linking issue, but feel free to move it to Slackware if it's more appropriate there.)
I compiled ffmpeg 3.4 (and the corresponding libavcodec.so) from source. The library is in /usr/local/lib, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes that directory; however, I tried to check if maybe Firefox couldn't find the library, so I ran strace, but apparently it never tries to load libavcodec.so (but I'm not very familiar with strace, so I might be doing something wrong).
Did you build firefox from source or use the pre-compiled binary from Mozilla? If it was the latter, it may only work with the ffmpeg version it was compiled against. If that is the case, it might be solved if you compile firefox itself, which would hopefully link to the system ffmpeg.
I got the pre-compiled binary, but I never had this problem before with pre-compiled Firefox and compiled ffmpeg. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, I'll think about that, though from a quick glance compiling Firefox doesn't look straightforward...
If you're trying to compile it by hand, yeah, it is kinda difficult. But you can just use the SlackBuild for -current. Download the following directory and then just run the SlackBuild script as root. You will require rust before you can compile firefox, but that is available on SBo. Once the SlackBuild is ran, you should be able to install it and hopefully it will work.
I don't know for sure if it will work, but if the pre-compiled firefox was built against an older version of ffmpeg (or it is expecting the binaries/libraries in different locations), it may not work. It's just speculation, but we can hope for the best.
Thanks. Yeah, I ended up trying the SlackBuild script, but it requires llvm/clang 3.9, and apparently 14.2 ships the 3.8, so I'm building it and it's taking an eternity.
Thanks. Yeah, I ended up trying the SlackBuild script, but it requires llvm/clang 3.9, and apparently 14.2 ships the 3.8, so I'm building it and it's taking an eternity.
You can try adding the option --disable-stylo-build-bindgen, which (I think) is the only thing in Firefox that needs to have LLVM.
No luck It's not working even with the compiled package.
One thing I'm wondering about is why, according to strace, firefox never seems to look for the libavcodec library. Shouldn't it at least try to load it, and then either fail to find it or find a wrong one (though there's only one libavcodec.so in my system)?
If it may be useful, I'm attaching the output of `strace firefox | grep lib` (510 lines). There's no mention of ffmpeg or libav whatsoever. What can this mean?
Distribution: Slackware/Salix while testing others
Posts: 1,718
Rep:
you could also copy the video link and play it in smplayer or VLC, or use the addon "UnPlug" and open in another tab or your favorite media player. Sadly, UnPlug does not work on FF57.
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