Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in
both Firefox and Chromium browsers.
On 07/12/2025 01:38, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:It's been cropping up routinely, a day or so after updating the system.
Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in
both Firefox and Chromium browsers.
What do you mean "once again"? Have you had this problem before?
How did you solve it then?Simply continuing to update as updates were offered. Last time this
... and why upgrade to Bookworm? Trixie (Debian 13) is the current version.Bookworm is the established install on the host in question.
Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in
both Firefox and Chromium browsers. The video starts to load, thumbnails
keep coming but the playback doesn't start and there's no sound.
I've tested it on the New York Times, YouTube, Netflix and some homemade videos that used to work. Now nothing plays, failing in the same way.
If there was reason to think upgrading to Trixie would help I'd try it,
but so far nobody has suggested that's the case. Bullseye seemed to work pretty well, Bookworm somewhat less so. That trend isn't encouraging....
Far as I've seen, the _only_ problem has been with watching videos. Otherwise the system is well-behaved.
bp@www.zefox.net wrote:
Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in
both Firefox and Chromium browsers. The video starts to load, thumbnails
keep coming but the playback doesn't start and there's no sound.
I've tested it on the New York Times, YouTube, Netflix and some homemade
videos that used to work. Now nothing plays, failing in the same way.
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries? Do video files play in other programs using
libavcodec (mplayer, ffplay)?
If there was reason to think upgrading to Trixie would help I'd try it,
but so far nobody has suggested that's the case. Bullseye seemed to work pretty well, Bookworm somewhat less so. That trend isn't encouraging....
Far as I've seen, the _only_ problem has been with watching videos. Otherwise the system is well-behaved.
bp@www.zefox.net wrote:
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
bp@www.zefox.net wrote:
Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in >>>> both Firefox and Chromium browsers. The video starts to load, thumbnails >>>> keep coming but the playback doesn't start and there's no sound.
I've tested it on the New York Times, YouTube, Netflix and some homemade >>>> videos that used to work. Now nothing plays, failing in the same way.
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries? Do video files play in other programs using
libavcodec (mplayer, ffplay)?
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
bp@www.zefox.net wrote:
Once again an upgrade to Bookworm on a Pi5 has killed video playback in
both Firefox and Chromium browsers. The video starts to load, thumbnails >>> keep coming but the playback doesn't start and there's no sound.
I've tested it on the New York Times, YouTube, Netflix and some homemade >>> videos that used to work. Now nothing plays, failing in the same way.
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries? Do video files play in other programs using
libavcodec (mplayer, ffplay)?
If I point firefox at www.youtube.com the controlling terminal
reports a series of
I've not paid any attention to controlling terminals on RasPiOS recently,
so I don't really know what to expect. It certainly looks like both Firefox and Chromium have things to complain about.
Re: Re: Chromium & Firefox can't play videos again
By: bp to All on Mon Dec 08 2025 10:00:01
If there was reason to think upgrading to Trixie would help I'd try it, but so far nobody has suggested that's the case. Bullseye seemed to work pretty well, Bookworm somewhat less so. That trend isn't encouraging....
Far as I've seen, the _only_ problem has been with watching videos. Otherwise the system is well-behaved.
I have no idea if this is related or not, but I sometimes have problems with the sound disappearing, and IIRC this started with the Bookworm upgrade a couple of yrs back. It isn't just raspbian but happens in the parent OS also.
Rebooting, and making sure the HDMI monitor is plugged in and turned on, usually fixes it -- even if the monitor was on the first time!
IMHO rasp/debian has developed some issue where it has trouble sensing the state of the HDMI monitor and, if it gets it wrong it does weird things.
If your monitor isn't HDMI then it could be a completely different issue but I
thought I would mention it just in case it was helpful.
I have a locally-recorded video at http://www.zefox.net/~bp/ampinvt/2nd_inverter/browser_viewable_2nd_inverter.mp4
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries?
On 8 Dec 2025 10:29:08 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries?
When you run a GUI app in the regular GUI way, it used to write its error messages to the file ~/.xsession-errors. Trouble is, lines in that file never had any timestamps or any other identifying information about where they came from. Under Wayland+systemd, you can now monitor those errors a bit more cleanly with journalctl --user.
On 8 Dec 2025 10:29:08 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
When you start Firefox from a terminal does it complain about any
missing libraries?
When you run a GUI app in the regular GUI way, it used to write its error messages to the file ~/.xsession-errors.
Trouble is, lines in that file
never had any timestamps or any other identifying information about where they came from. Under Wayland+systemd, you can now monitor those errors a bit more cleanly with journalctl --user.
I find journalctl unclean in all the most important respects ...
On 20 Dec 2025 17:38:15 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
I find journalctl unclean in all the most important respects ...
If that's what your system is using to record its per-user log files,
then your choices are either a) learn to use it, or b) switch to a
different distro.
On 22 Dec 2025 10:50:06 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On 20 Dec 2025 17:38:15 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
I find journalctl unclean in all the most important respects ...
If that's what your system is using to record its per-user log
files, then your choices are either a) learn to use it, or b)
switch to a different distro.
Already done b), and in fact on Raspberry Pi I have the
(non-Systemd) syslog daemon started manually only for debugging, so
normally there are no such logs at all.
So what happens to the diagnostic messages from GUI apps that you run?
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On 20 Dec 2025 17:38:15 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
I find journalctl unclean in all the most important respects ...
If that's what your system is using to record its per-user log
files, then your choices are either a) learn to use it, or b)
switch to a different distro.
Already done b), and in fact on Raspberry Pi I have the
(non-Systemd) syslog daemon started manually only for debugging, so
normally there are no such logs at all.
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
So what happens to the diagnostic messages from GUI apps that you
run?
They go to the framebuffer console X is started from (Ctrl-Alt-F1),
unless they were started from a terminal window. But those messages
aren't sent to syslog by the GUI applications, maybe your systems
have something extra which does that when GUI programs are started?
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