I have discovered that installing the ffmpeg-free package degrades
Firefox video support. Without any kind of ffmpeg installed, Firefox is
able to play all the videos I want to watch. Installing RPM Fusion's
ffmpeg package does not change this. But, installing ffmpeg-free from
Fedora repositories causes some videos not to play.
This is unexpected, because one would expect that installing any variant
of ffmpeg would improve video support, not degrade it. My hypothesis is
that Firefox prefers ffmpeg over openh264, but is not careful enough to
check if the ffmpeg it detects actually supports h264.
As a workaround, I can set media.ffmpeg.enabled in Firefox's
about:config to false. Then all videos play again, even with ffmpeg-free
installed.
Here is an example video from Youtube that can be used as a reproducer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETsAH96BsBg
It seems clear that there is a bug somewhere, but I cannot decide,
where, hence this post to devel. Should Fedora's Firefox actually have
media.ffmpeg.enabled set to false by default, because Fedora's variant
of ffmpeg has this problem? Should upstream Firefox be smarted about
which decoder library it attempts to use? Or should ffmpeg-free package
do something to avoid this from happening. Any opinions are welcome!
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