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Embedded mp4 videos not playing in Firefox on Linux

mp4 videos are not playing in Firefox under Linux for JW Player 6. Instead they show up as a black box with "Error loading player: no playable sources found". This behavior occurs in the latest version of Firefox without Flash installed. The videos play normally with a Webkit-based browser like GNOME Web or Chromium (not Google Chrome, so no Flash plugin, just HTML5). An example video would be any of the videos on http://video.pbs.org/feature/86/. Is the problem with JW Player or Firefox? If it is a Firefox problem, please give me some information and I can open a bug for Firefox.

9 Community Answers

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mark

User  
0 rated :

I also found this problem last night but it was on JW player 7.
Firefox Windows

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jose

User  
0 rated :

Customer support is awesome here

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jherrieven

User  
0 rated :

@wsha.code

I'm not really up on Linux, but I suspect this is down to the fact that native MP4 support in Firefox has only "relatively recently" been introduced, and even still some device/OS combinations are dependent on additional plugins/configuration.

Checking the mozilla website states that Firefox 26.0+ on Linux relies on GStreamer codecs.

Plus the following site gives details of additional steps required in order to enable MSE for streaming files (such as YouTube) natively - not sure, but maybe this will provide a clue as to why things are not playing for you.

http://www.linuxveda.com/2015/04/02/enable-mse-native-html5-support-firefox-linux/

James Herrieven

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Randy

JW Player Support Agent  
1 rated :

Hello,

Flash support within Linux for FF has not been updated in sometime. We have tested this internally and have found more success when using Linux and Chrome as a combo playback platform. We do not have a definitive timeline on this but are actively looking at solutions.

Kindly,

Randy Le’Moine, Web Support Engineer, JW Player
www.jwplayer.com

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wsha.code

User  
0 rated :

Thanks for the replies. I just want to make sure a couple points are clear:

1. Videos play fine on video.pbs.org in Chromium without any form of Flash installed on my computer.

2. I can play HTML5 videos in Firefox. YouTube for example works fine.

3. I asked on another forum and someone sent me direct link to an mp4 file hosted on pbs.org. That mp4 played fine in Firefox.

So it seems to me that the video playback itself should work fine but that something about how the player loads the video is not working.

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matl

User  
0 rated :

Hello,

We have several users having the same problems with Linux/Firefox and Jwplayer7.0.1.

My workstation is also a Linux and I work mainly with Firefox.

But I cannot reproduce this bug.

@wsha.code : Could you tell me if you have the same problem with our videos :

* The page with Jwplayer7 : http://www.rtbf.be/video/detail_jt-19h30?id=2038326
* The url of the file : http://podvideo.prd.rtbf.be/redirect/rtbf_vod/folder-32464/mp4-383/info__jt_250820151930__250820151930-fc.mp4

Regards

Mathieu

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wsha.code

User  
0 rated :

Mathieu, I am able to play the video both from the JW player link and the mp4 link.

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mail

User  
0 rated :

I'm having the same problem as well, although the link by mail worked. Where I experience the issue currently is on all streams on https://picarto.tv/ – with the given error message.

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wsha.code

User  
0 rated :

The site I was having issues with (video.pbs.org) updated to JW Player 7 and now works with Firefox on Linux without Flash.

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