1

High all!

After upgrading Ubuntu to Version 18.04 Firefox 60 has no sound when playing an mp4 video.

  • The same video has audio when played in Chrome.
  • Youtube videos have sound in Firefox.

The speaker symbol on the video screen is x-ed out and can not be changed.

Firefox is not shown as an Application in PulseAudio when the mp4 video is played.

Any ideas?

1
  • I figured out that the sound is missing because there seeem to be no aac support. After downloading and re-encoding the audio in mp3 format I could play the video in firefox. Why is there no aac support in Firefox and how do I get it?
    – Richard
    May 29, 2018 at 5:44

5 Answers 5

2

I had exactly the same problem. Fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 ("Bionic Beaver") today (May 27, 2018) - full fresh install wiping all files on single partition of my laptop hard drive, hence no chance of old settings hanging around. No problems with sound in any other instances.

The answer was this old fix:

No sound from Chrome, sound works fine in Firefox etc (13.10)

Install pavucontrol from the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

To open pavucontrol from the Terminal:

pavucontrol

Select the "Playback" menu and make sure that you have it set to Show Applications. Now, start playing something from Google Chrome. It will show up there, and it will show what output device is being used for Google Chrome. Make sure it is set to the output device you are trying to use.

Just posting here to let everyone else know. Ubuntu and Chromium should know too, since the solution is more than 4 years old :)

Thank you to everyone who posts their solutions here - you ladies and gents have helped me immensely with simple fixes many, many times. Thank you!

2
  • Thanks Chris, pavu is installed but the application is not shown because Firefox does not even try to play the sound ...
    – Richard
    May 29, 2018 at 5:45
  • This one worked for me. For some reason, my system was trying to play Firefox's audio through HDMI when I did not have anything plugged in via HDMI. Sep 29, 2018 at 14:58
1

I fixed the issue after installing all Gstreamer add-ons from software store. Good luck!

2
  • Thank you Tom! There are 175 gstreamer packages in my distro. libgstreamer-plugins are installed, no luck. Do you have a clue which gstreamer add-on did the trick for you?
    – Richard
    May 29, 2018 at 5:41
  • I installed 'ugly' set, opencv plugins, gtk+3, qt5, libav and bad set.
    – Tom
    May 31, 2018 at 12:39
0

This issue is not Ubuntu-related.

I found out that seemingly Firefox cannot generally play that sort of mp4 video. People who use Firefox under Windows experienced the exact same issues with the video.

Only by chance this happened to me right after upgrading Ubuntu which lead me on the wrong track.

0

I use Lubuntu 14.04 in a 20-year old machine. I installed Firefox Quantum 63.0.3 on it. Nothing seemed to be working until I installed PulseAudio from the Lubuntu Software Center. Good luck.

0

What worked for me was

Settings > Sound > Applications

Turn on Firefox

Hope this helps!

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .