How to play videos on Lynda.com?

firefox video chromium

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Ah, found it! It was ffmpeg

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Restart firefox, and all good :)

Still doesn't work on Chromium though, oh well.

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Jeff Puckett

Director of Engineering at https://www.dealerinspire.com Some things: When something isn't working, first check firewall and cache before pulling your hair out. "It's easy once you know what to look for and where to look." -Jeff Walton "Finding bugs is almost as much fun as writing them." -John Gauch "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." -Phil Karlton "Hard work is waste, always use copy-paste." -Vinit Varghese "Also note that it is your responsibility to die() if necessary." -PHP docs

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Jeff Puckett almost 2 years

I filed a customer support ticket because Lynda.com videos wouldn't play in Chromium on Ubuntu 16.04, and they dismissed the ticket saying:

We are sorry for the difficulty. Unfortunately, our system requirements do not support Ubuntu. You may find it possible to use our site with certain browsers on Ubuntu but we are not able to support issues that might arise when using that OS.

Now I have two desktops running 16.04 (one at home, and one at work), and I find that Chromium doesn't work on either - it just gets in this endless loop of click play, then pops up download link that merely reloads the page:

However, firefox works on my work machine, but not at home. At work, when I click play, it just plays the video as expected.

So, this leads me to the conclusion that I must have some additional codecs/software installed on my work machine that I don't at home.

My question is: how can I determine what's happening on my work machine so that I can reproduce and install whatever is needed at home?
- Cristiana Nicolae over 7 years
  
  Kind of off-topic comment: I love this .gif! It's beautiful! Such images can be easily used in tutorials!
- Jeff Puckett over 7 years
  
  @Cristiana Thanks! I use Rob W's scripts with byzanz.
- Startec almost 7 years
  
  @JeffPuckett this really seems like a Chromium bug. I opened an issue referencing this post here
- Fiddy Bux about 5 years
  
  April 2019 now, and it doesn't seem to have been addressed. Lynda.com videos won't play OOTB in Opera or Chromium in Ubuntu 19.04, but with ffmpeg installed they work fine in Firefox. Labelled with status "Won't Fix" here: bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=765057
Romulus over 6 years

Thanks for the post! Here you can find how to install ffmpeg on centos vultr.com/docs/how-to-install-ffmpeg-on-centos
Fiddy Bux about 5 years

I am in the same situation. I already had ffmpeg installed, so Firefox just worked for me with Lynda.com. However, for no reason that I am aware of, Chromium and Opera both refuse to play Lynda.com videos. I'm using Ubuntu 19.04.