Firefox videos missing green channel
This is Firefox 52.0.2 32 bit ESR, Solaris 10U13 Sparc, on a 2.75 GHz. quad core Sparc VII Sun M3000 from a Sun Ray 3 thin client.
ffmpeg, libx264 and libx265 have all been installed from https://www.opencsw.org/get-it/packages/. Flash 11.2 r202 is also installed.
A look at https://www.youtube.com/html5 shows all six boxes under "What does this browser support?" are checked. The box "The HTML5 player is currently used when possible" is also checked.
I can get H264 and AVC1 videos to play but they're all missing the green channel, ie. they come out rendered only in shades of red and blue. This isn't specific to any particular site (like Youtube), it's all videos.
I saw one suggestion to set media.windows-media-foundation.use-nv12-format to false but that didn't fix it. There are lots of posts about things like washed out colors but this isn't like that. It's no green at all.
I don't think this is a libx264 issue because if I download an H264 video and then play it using mplayer, the colors all look fine. It's only when playing video in Firefox that there's no green. Other imaging programs that render color (like Gimp or Inkscape) work fine.
Any ideas?
Wšě wotmołwy (5)
Unfortunately Firefox 52 is no longer supported. Do you see this issue with ESR 60 or Release 67?
Thanks but unfortunately Release 52.0.2 is the last one that works with Solaris 10. After that they started requiring Rust to build FF (thanks, Mozilla). And AFAIK, there is no Rust compiler for Solaris. I'd be happy to try a later version if someone can figure out how to compile (or cross-compile) it.
FWIW, colors are correct in Windows XP FF 52.9.0.
In the past, color issues with Flash were related to libvdpau and a possible solution if you use NVIDIA drivers was:
- export VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1
Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions ("3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is is causing the problem.
- switch to the DEFAULT theme: "3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Themes
- do NOT click the "Refresh Firefox" button on the Safe Mode start window
It was worth trying, but Safe Mode did not fix it.
I have not been able to figure out what video drivers the Sun Ray 3 uses.
What's really weird is that if you drag the mouse along the time line of Youtube videos, the little thumbnail pop-up preview windows (that show the frame at any given time) are in correct full color. But if you hit play from that point, the full video is missing green.
Also odd is that static images in Firefox render just fine. It's only videos that are missing all green.
I keep hoping there's some magic media.whatever key in about:config I can set to fix this.
Oh and here's something also odd. In about:support under WebGL Renderer I see:
WebGL creation failed: * Refused to create native OpenGL context because of blacklist entry: FEATURE_FAILURE_MESA_2 * Exhausted GL driver options.
Blacklist entry??? What the heck is that all about?
Well here's something interesting. I installed the next newest version of Firefox for Solaris which turned out to be 45.5.1 and tried to play videos with it. And they work fine! All colors are present.
So it looks like whatever the problem is, it's specific to FF 52.0.2 and not a video card, driver, codec, library, or whatever. Apparently, something got broken on the way to 52.
So I guess I'll just use 45.5.1 to watch videos from now on. It's not a solution but it is a workaround.