I can't play live videos on YouTube (problem with live transmission) - Ubuntu 18.04.5

[Piotr]

Dear Launchpad Team,

I can't play live videos from Youtube. I have problem only with live transmission. Normal videos works fine. I noticed that I also have this same problem on Focal (now I checked this on Bionic - Ubuntu 18.04.5). On Lubuntu 18.04.5 on other machine I don't have this problem. I can play on Lubuntu all Youtube videos. What is a problem? Do you know? I think that by default Ubuntu have not necessary package to play live videos on Youtube. Have I right or this is a bug? On Answers section on launchpad anyone can't tell me if it is a bug so this is why I report this bug now. If it is not a bug I am very sorry and you can delete this report now.

Example I have problem with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg

I used debugger by youtube and this is output of this:

"debug_error": {
    "errorCode": "html5.unsupportedlive",
    "errorMessage": "Ten format wideo nie jest obsługiwany.",
    "Nx": "HTML5_NO_AVAILABLE_FORMATS_FALLBACK",
    "cj": "","

If it is a bug can you fix it?

UPDATE: Today I updated my firefox to the newest version 86.0. This bug still exists.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Bernard Stafford (bernard010)]

Please Link:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1916363
to this bug report.
Firefox will not play live streaming video. Ubuntu 20.04 I used apport to gather information.
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+question/695633

[Piotr (peterq94)]

@Bernard Stafford thank you very much for your help. I can't see option to link this bug report to your bug. How I can do this?

[Piotr (peterq94)]

I checked and this problematic video use mp4a codec so I have question to Ubuntu developers - firefox should play this video by default? I don't have installed any additional packages but on Lubuntu system this works fine.

[Piotr (peterq94)]

Today I updated my firefox to the newest version 86.0. Bug still exists.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

MP4a is an audio codec. According to YouTube, the video that you linked to above is using the AVC1 codec, also known as H.264 or just MP4, or at least that is what YouTube has decided to send to my Bionic system running Firefox 86.0.1. Firefox has built-in support for H.264 video.

Can you confirm that YouTube is sending you AVC1 video? What Firefox extensions do you have installed.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

On bionic, try installing libavcodec57 (on focal it would be libavcodec58).
After doing this and restarting firefox, does the video play?

[Piotr (peterq94)]

I will try this soon. I can see that this libavcodec57 is from universe repositories. Is it safe program? Why Ubuntu don't have installed this by default? Is it licence problem? Second question is to updates for libavcodec57 after April 2021 year. This is from Universe repositories so this package will be not get updates in the future? This is very important for me because I want to have bionic and I want to not migrate to focal.

[Piotr (peterq94)]

@madbiologist, I have problems with this video from the link and I can confirm that this is MP4 video:

"video/mp4; codecs=\"avc1.4d4020\"","bitrate":3481000,

I don't have installed libavcodec57 yet but I would like to know if it is normal that Mozilla can run these kind videos (mp4) by default?

[Piotr (peterq94)]

*of course I mean that Mozilla can't run these kind of videos. I wrote that can run but this is not true. Firefox can't run in my PC mp4 video.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

libavcodec57 is built from the ffmpeg source, so there may be licensing issues depending on where you live and use it. But as an end-user this shouldn't be much of a concern (IANAL).

According to the official documentation (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/FAQ#Standard_Support), packages in universe are maintained by the Ubuntu community. If you look at the latest update though (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/7:3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2), you will see that it was done by the Ubuntu security team.

Note that bionic will eventually reach end of life too (on 2023-04-26), so at some point in the next two years you will have to upgrade to focal.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Sorry, I was wrong about Firefox's built-in support for H.264 video. It is only used for WebRTC (a type of in-browser videoconferencing).

As Olivier said, installing libavcodec57 (or installing ffmpeg) will provide the H.264 decoding capability that you need to view this video and many others on YouTube and other sites.

[Piotr (peterq94)]

After installation libavcodec57 live videos on YouTube start working but this package for bionic is not supported after April 2021. Is it option to migrate this codec to main repository and support after April 2021? Can you tell me?

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Packages in universe don't migrate to main in a released version of Ubuntu. Please read again comment #11, one can be fairly confident that critical security issues will be fixed in such an important package, even after the official support period has ended. If you don't trust the Ubuntu community on this matter, you should upgrade to the next LTS (focal).

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Hmm, that might need to be updated. Where does it say that?