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I have Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS installed on by Dell with firefox 68.0.2 (64-bit). ubuntu-restricted-extras is installed and several option in the about:config are enabled for mp4. A few days ago MP4 did work on firefox. After some updated from Ubuntu, it stopped working. I reinstalled ubuntu-restricted-extras abd firefox (options about:config enabled after reinstall).

Also note the VLC is installed and can play MP4 files.

https://html5test.com/ report for video codecs:

  • MP4 with H.264 support: No
  • MP4 with H.265 support: No
  • TS with H.264 support: No
  • TS with H.265 support: No
  • WebM with VP8 support: Yes
  • WebM with VP9 support: Yes

Does anyone know how to fix this, or know how to let firefox log why it can't play mp4 (and where to find those logs).

David
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5 Answers5

2

For ubuntu 20.04, run:

apt install libavcodec58

IvanM
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  • 1
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1

After a while resting it, I decided to try again. First post says again to install ffmpeg package. Instead of trying installing it by apt, I tried ffmpeg -version. This showed me an error that libva.so.1 was not found. libva.so.2 was available. Making a symbolic link named libva.so.1 (to libva.so) and doing this for couple other libraries worked for me.

David
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0

This was the issue that came up when I was looking for solutions to why firefox was not playing mp4s.

@michals comment on the question above led me to the solution I needed: https://askubuntu.com/a/1072894/363742

dannypaz
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0

Firefox and other browsers use ffmpeg to play videos. The stock ffmpeg cannot play h264 content. I had to recompile ffmpeg with h264 capability. I got the sources for the same versions already installed and enabled shared libraries. Once all the libraries were upgraded, all videos played fine.

Alton
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0

I was recently dealing with the same problem in Firefox 129.0.1, Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. When installing Firefox using apt, it was installed using snap. I tried using both snap and flatpak. Turns out, when running software in a sandbox environment (as snap and flatpak do), they don't have access to system packages, including FFMPEG.

For me, the problem was solved by installing FFMPEG for flatpak, by running

flatpak info org.mozilla.firefox
flatpak install org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full

and choosing the same FFMPEG version as the Firefox runtime version.

Got the solution from the following source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1436190

Henk
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