H.264 videos fail in Firefox or Chromium on Fedora 30

Question

https://www.youtube.com/html5 reports my browsers (Firefox 66.0.5-1.fc30 and Chromium 73.0.3683.86-2.fc30) on my Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 with a Radeon RX-580 GPU don't support H.264. I've tried installing gstreamer1-plugin-openh264.x86_64, mozilla-openh264.x86_64, and openh264.x86_64, from fedora-cisco-openh264 but that didn't help.

What's my next step?

Solution

From what I can gather, the missing package that makes YouTube HTML5 videos work in Firefox (and possibly Chrome) is ffmpeg. This you can find in negativo17's fedora-multimedia repo, or in rpmfusion-free (but don't install both repos as they conflict).

From some notes made by negativo17, it appears that he has only built hardware H.264 acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs. I'm not sure if that means it won't work with AMD GPUs or if it will work anyway but without acceleration. You might end up thinking about buying a different GPU.

Comments

[Amitav Pajni]

@K7AAY This isn't about stability (Fedora is quite stable, and not really all that bleeding edge) but about the requirement for non-free software.

[markonius]

ffmpeg-libs from rpmfusion did the trick! thank you

[Amitav Pajni]

That should do you nicely, then. I have an NVIDIA GPU so I use negativo17's packages instead of rpmfusion.

[icc97]

I had to restart my system also to get the videos working