How-to: h264 etc. Support for Firefox (including ffmpeg install)

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re asking. I believe the version installed using swupd is actually just vanilla upstream, and it works just fine…

Hi! Thanks for your reply.

I had the impression that the swupd version is built from source by one of the Clear developers, with the usual optimizations and maybe some customizations. It occurred to me that it might be built against a different version of ffmpeg than the “official” Mozilla builds. As it turns out, the Mozilla builds also use ffmpeg 4.1.3. I installed the update, and it seems to work fine.

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I did all the recommended steps - unfortunately there is no result. Still cannot play h264. What might be the reason for this?

There’s a flag in about:config of Firefox that you need to turn on.

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Thanks for your reply - could you specify, which flag you are referring to?

You shouldn’t need to enable any flags… Are you able to run ffmpeg from the command line?

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No - result:
ffmpeg: command not found
To install ffmpeg use: sudo swupd bundle-add kde-frameworks5-dev

Something probably went wrong at this step

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared && make && sudo make install

Try splitting the commands out to try and pinpoint the issue.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared
$ make
$ sudo make install
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Thanks for your help - unfortunatelly after the “make” command a flow of repeating commands appear, which do not stop anymore. No chance to enter the third command…

I made it - just had to wait a bit. It works now!
Thanks a lot!!

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Unfortunately firefox changed back to normal (no h.264 support) after a restart of the system…

Can you do
$ cat /etc/ld.so.conf
Then
$ cat ${HOME}/.config/firefox.conf
And post the output?

jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ $ cat /etc/ld.so.conf
cat: /etc/ld.so.conf: No such file or directory
jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ $ cat ${HOME}/.config/firefox.conf
cat: /home/jl/.config/firefox.conf: No such file or directory
jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ $

I can’t play some videos on Youtube, but not all. I’m going back to Kubuntu. I was going to try to use Clear Linux, but this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think it did work before, so I don’t know what is going on, but all this terminal buld stuff is beyond my capabilities.

Is not posible to have a ffmpeg CL package with: “Compile FFmpeg without “–enable-gpl” and without “–enable-nonfree”?”
Because : “x264 is a free software library and application for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL.”

No, unfortunately it’s not that simple, otherwise, we would have already done that … 4 years ago or so.

Is it not possible to provide an extra non free repo like rpmfusion on Fedora ?

rpmfusion is not operated by Fedora. Fedora couldn’t for the very same reason we can’t.

Try the following

mkdir ~/.config
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib" > ~/.config/firefox.conf

Thanks for your help - there you go:

cat /etc/ld.so.conf /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib cat ${HOME}/.config/firefox.conf
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

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jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ mkdir ~/.config mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/home/jl/.config’: File exists jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ echo “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib” > ~/.config/firefox.conf
jl@clr-1ee3a8f796814644be5fa2cb94f4339f ~ $

Didn’t work. Plus I’m finding Gnome to be a clumsy desktop environment compared to most others.