I installed Firefox through Flatpak on Fedora KDE and enabled both the free and non-free RPM Fusion repositories. In Firefox, the OpenH264 Video Codec plugin stays stuck on "will be installed shortly" and never finishes. Most YouTube videos play normally, but some—especially older uploads—fail to play. Opera plays everything, although the videos sometimes show visual artifacts, so I'd prefer to keep using Firefox. What codecs or settings should I check?
3 Answers
It may be worth testing the regular Fedora Firefox package instead of the Flatpak, since the sandbox can make access to system codecs more complicated. However, switching package formats is not guaranteed to fix it—the default non-Flatpak Firefox also failed to play videos for me.
Make sure the codecs are actually installed, not just that the RPM Fusion repositories are enabled. On Fedora, people commonly install the full multimedia support with commands like `sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing` followed by `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.
If this started after a recent FFmpeg update, it may be a compatibility issue in Firefox rather than YouTube itself. Trying another Firefox-based build can help confirm that, although getting the multimedia libraries and Flatpak runtime components aligned is usually the better first step.
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