I’m using the Fedora Silverblue 40 beta. In 39 and before, I used to layer the mozilla-openh264 package to add h264 video playback support to Firefox. mozilla-openh264 depends on openh264, but openh264 is explicitly excluded from f40 because of a new noopenh264 package that conflicts with it.
I found the source code for noopenh264, but I’m not sure I understand what is changing in f40 regarding h264 playback.
What options are there for playing h264 videos in Firefox in f40?
Have you tried rpm-ostree override remove noopenh264 --install mozilla-openh264?
This worked for me.
That works for me too. Thanks!
I still wish I understood what changed in f40, why the noopenh264 package is included now, and if it’s possible to use noopenh264 with mozilla-h264.
noopenh264 is meant to act as a placeholder that is automatically replaced by openh264 from the Cisco repo on the first update. This is a clever workaround to have it installed ‘by default’ without redistributing it in the installer image (which would be illegal).
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for Silverblue because rpm-ostree isn’t going to allow anything to automatically replace a package in the base image.
The ultimate solution is probably to move away from having Firefox in the base image, but that’s not ready yet.
Thank you!
Maybe, adding Firefox as flatpak only, or maybe just removing noopenh264 from the Silverblue base.
I was actually just considering that. There doesn’t seem to be any obstacle to removing it at the moment, but I think it needs to stay because libavcodec-free may start linking against noopenh264’s stub library instead of dlopening openh264 (which requires a downstream patch).
It makes sense. Let’s say that on a distribution that relies so much on flatpak apps having the default browser as flatpak is probably a logical solution.
I was lucky to discover this, I spent three hours trying to figure out why ffmpegthumbnailer had stopped working on my new Fedora installation. The only workaround I found was to run the following command:
rpm-ostree override remove noopenh264 --install openh264
I kindly urge you to consider removing that package, as it can create significant issues, especially for new users. I promote Linux on YouTube, and my Fedora tutorial became outdated without my knowledge.