I installed Firefox through Flatpak on Fedora KDE and enabled the additional multimedia repositories, but some YouTube videos still refuse to play. The OpenH264 Video Codec entry in Firefox remains stuck on "will be installed shortly" and never completes. Most videos work, but older uploads seem more likely to fail. Opera plays everything, although I see occasional visual artifacts there, so I'd prefer to keep using Firefox. What codecs or configuration should I check?
3 Answers
Switching away from the Flatpak may help, but it isn’t guaranteed to fix it. The standard Fedora Firefox package also failed to play videos for me, so the underlying issue may be the FFmpeg or codec setup rather than Flatpak itself.
This may be related to a recent FFmpeg update. If the problem only started within the last few days, another Firefox build could help confirm whether it’s a packaging issue. It’s worth testing a different installation method after checking the codecs.
Make sure the codecs are actually installed, not just that the repositories are enabled. On Fedora, you can replace the limited FFmpeg package and install the multimedia group with commands like these:
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing
sudo dnf install @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
Hardware-acceleration packages may also be needed depending on whether you use Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA graphics.
That’s useful to know. I’ll check the installed multimedia packages first instead of assuming the packaging format is the only cause.