Bug 1039213

Summary: Firefox won't play h.264 html5 <video> despite media.gstreamer.enabled=true
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Craig <candrews>
Component: firefoxAssignee: Gecko Maintainer <gecko-bugs-nobody>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 25CC: candrews, gecko-bugs-nobody, jhorak, rainwoodman, stransky
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Reopened
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2017-05-10 06:53:45 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:

Description Craig 2013-12-06 23:18:26 UTC
Description of problem:
Using Firefox in Fedora (Firefox 25), Firefox will not play HTML5 h.264 <video> elements.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox
2. Go to about:config, set "media.gstreamer.enabled" to "true"
3. Go to http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html
4. Look at the H.264/MP4 video. It will say "No video with supported format and MIME type found" This is as expected; we haven't installed the h.264 codecs yet. Note that it would be nice for Firefox to pop up the codec installer at this time; however, that's probably a feature requests I should file upstream (thoughts?)
5. Take note of the H.264/MP4 video's URL (it's http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4 ). Open that directly in Firefox.
6. Firefox will prompt to install some packages for the h.264 codecs. Install them, then restart Firefox.
7. Go to http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html again

Actual results:
The H.264/MP4 video still says "No video with supported format and MIME type found"
This is strange, because now if you go directly to the video URL http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4 Firefox will play the video just fine.

Expected results:
The video should play inline at the http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html page.

Additional info:
YouTube does some Javascript tests, too. I would expect that H.264 would show as supported after installing the packages, but both before and after additional package installation, https://www.youtube.com/html5 reports that H.264 is not supported. So Firefox isn't reporting the format is availabe in Javascript, just as http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html shows that it isn't showing the format as supported for the <video> element.

Comment 1 Jan Horak 2013-12-10 13:04:54 UTC
Problem is that we don't build with gstreamer because the only working version with mozilla code is 0.10.x. This version is no longer supported by gstreamer guys which could lead to potential vulnerability of users.

You can track progress in support of gstreamer 1.0 here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806917

Direct link http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4 most likely use some plugin (like QuckTime) to playback the video.

As soon as support to gstreamer 1.0 will be available we're happy to build with it.

Comment 2 Craig 2013-12-10 18:41:12 UTC
(In reply to Jan Horak from comment #1)
> Problem is that we don't build with gstreamer because the only working
> version with mozilla code is 0.10.x. This version is no longer supported by
> gstreamer guys which could lead to potential vulnerability of users.
> 
> You can track progress in support of gstreamer 1.0 here:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806917
> 
> Direct link http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4 most
> likely use some plugin (like QuckTime) to playback the video.
> 
> As soon as support to gstreamer 1.0 will be available we're happy to build
> with it.

I'm confused - if that's true, then why would going directly to the mp4 video http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4 bring up the Fedora package manager prompt for gstreamer package installation, and then the second time actually play the video?

Comment 3 Martin Stransky 2013-12-11 07:41:25 UTC
Check how the media is played. For me it's played by /usr/libexec/totem-plugin-viewer which is a plugin for totem player installed in Fedora. 

So it's not run by Firefox itself but by embeded NPAPI plugin. You can have such plugin for other players, like vlc, mplayer or so...

Comment 4 Martin Stransky 2013-12-11 07:43:14 UTC
btw. "$ps axf" on console shows you. You can also see your plugins in Tools -> Add-ons -> Plugins.

Comment 5 Feng Yu 2017-05-10 04:53:04 UTC
Hi, I am reopening this for Fedora 25.


Although the gstreamer-1.0 support has been added to firefox in Fedora 25 the video tag with h264 content still won't play.

One can verify this by installing all packages with h264 and visit the page mentioned here:

https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html

Versions of possibiliy relevant packages:

mozilla-openh264-1.6.0-5.fc25.x86_64
openh264-1.6.0-5.fc25.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugin-openh264-1.10.4-1.fc25.x86_64

Comment 6 Martin Stransky 2017-05-10 06:53:45 UTC
gstreamer support was removed from Firefox and it uses ffmpeg only now.