Re: Browser video problems on Bookworm

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 15 May 2025 04:02:30 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:
 

Following a recent update to Bookworm on a Pi5 both Firefox and Chromium
lost the ability to play videos. The video starts loading, but never
begins playing.

 
One really low-level test you can conduct is
 
1) Use “youtube-dl --print urls «video-page»” (feel free to use one of the
youtube-dl successors, like yt-dlp) to get the URLs of the direct video/
audio streams. Beware: they can look pretty gigantic.
2) Pass one of these to ffplay (part of the FFmpeg suite) to see if it can
play them. Or even VLC, if you prefer.
 
That just takes the browser completely out of the loop, to see if the
problem might lie elsewhere (or not).

I just tried copying an old mp4 file that used to play in Chromium via
http to my local Pi5. The video has incidental sound. Played locally
with VLC the video runs, but silently.

Played locally with chromium, it does not run at all. Progress bar stuck
at zero.

Not sure what to make of this behavior, but it does seem that chromium
fails worse than VLC.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska