Question

4

Firefox stopped playing videos in Ubuntu 20.04

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1676 / 1 Year ago, thu, april 20, 2023, 6:10:24

I'm running Firefox 84.0 on Ubuntu 20.04. Everything was working fine until a couple of weeks ago when Firefox just stopped being able to play videos. It doesn't matter whether the site is YouTube or Crunchyroll, or what the format is.

If I visit a page with a video, for example a YouTube site, it spins and eventually tells me, "If this video doesn't play after a few seconds, try restarting your device." In the console I see errors like Cannot play media. No decoders for requested formats: audio/webm; codecs="opus", video/mp4; codecs="av01.0.04M.08" (or some other codec - it doesn't appear to matter what it is).

I've tried refreshing Firefox, launching under a new profile, clearing the cache (and cookies), installing/uninstalling/reinstalling ffmpeg and libavcodec, turning off "Play DRM protected content" between restarting firefox, launching in safe mode, and of course rebooting. Nothing seems to work.

How do I get video playback to work again in Firefox? Is there some log somewhere that will tell me what's going on?

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throecember

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answered 1 Year ago theurn · Accepted Answer

So the problem sort of miraculously went away after copious amounts of pulseaudio -k at the terminal. After doing that a dozen or so times, the problem almost disappeared; now when I see a video start to spin, I use that same command and the problem goes away.