They play for a couple of seconds, then the panel they are playing in goes black. They used to work a month or two ago. Videos play fine in YouTube. They also play fine i… (read more)
They play for a couple of seconds, then the panel they are playing in goes black. They used to work a month or two ago. Videos play fine in YouTube. They also play fine in apps like VideoPlayer and VLC.
They play fine in Chromium based browsers Opera, Brave and Vivaldi. My graphics card requires switching acceleration off. I can’t find a switch for that in Firefox.
Problem
Videos start playing, then after a few seconds the video panel turns black. Audio may continue. Refreshing does not help.
Environment
OS: Fedora Linux 43
Firefox 147.0.1 (also tested Firefox Flatpak)
Display server: Wayland and X11 (both tested)
Hardware acceleration: on and off (tested)
Media Source Extensions: enabled (disabling MSE triggers an “unsupported device” error)
What works
BBC News videos play correctly in Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Vivaldi)
Videos play correctly in mpv/VLC
Other video sites (e.g., YouTube) play correctly in Firefox
What I’ve tried in Firefox
Disabling hardware acceleration
Disabling VA-API
Disabling WebRender
Disabling RDD sandbox
Running Firefox under X11
Using the Firefox Flatpak build
None of these measures help. This suggests the issue is related to Firefox’s interaction with BBC’s player on Linux. Has anyone else seen this, or is there a known workaround?