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Videos not playing in Firefox

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  • Last reply by James

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Every time I tried o watch a video in Firefox, any website, I get the error "There was an error loading or playing the video". But when I try using Chrome, everything works just fine. What do I have to do?

Every time I tried o watch a video in Firefox, any website, I get the error "There was an error loading or playing the video". But when I try using Chrome, everything works just fine. What do I have to do?

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I'm using Ubuntu, btw.

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Do you have FFmpeg and perhaps libavcodec packages installed?

Patent and copyright restrictions are among reasons why many Linux distros do not come with packages such as FFmpeg in a new install as it provides codecs needed to fully support HTML5 players.

As you using a flavour of Ubuntu so perhaps see https://linuxconfig.org/ubuntu-20-04-ffmpeg-installation or https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Chrome/Chromium basically cheats by coming with its own codecs.