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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?

4 Answers 4

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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.

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  • +1, worked like a charm for me as well. I had a Bluetooth speaker which got disconnected after I ran that command once, and immediately I noticed the video back is fixed! after that I reconnected the speaker and all was fine. I guess this might have something to do with the drivers somehow messing up after some x amount of uptime (my machine is always on and running heavy processes (both cpu/gpu intensive) . Also I'm on 22.04 (upgraded from 20.04) to be exact.
    – Hossein
    Oct 22, 2022 at 14:43
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My firefox weren't playing videos (Ubuntu 20.4). I found this on google and worked:

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

for the license use TAB and Enter

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For me killing pulseaudio didn't work, but killing pipewire and pipewire-media-session did.

Try if this helps.

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Disable DRM / CDM plugging(s) and give it a shot, it worked for me (haven't watched videos on youtube before doing so though, so we might not share the same problem)

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