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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

Has firefox fixed video playback on sites like instagram and gfycat yet? Their mp4 playback was broken for a significant number of videos last time I attempted to update. I'm still on an FF version 10 versions back because of their atrocious compatibility with mp4s (which is still incompatible, but less so).

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What have you noticed about mp4 video playback that is broken? I've used Firefox as my daily driver for many, many years (even before the Quantum updates) and have never noticed any playback errors.

It simply doesn't work for some non-trivial amount of videos, e.g. some instagram stories or gfycat mp4s. If you load the link directly in the browser it will say the file is corrupt. Loading the same link in chrome plays fine.

Would you mind filing a bug at [0] with the content of about:support and maybe a link or two where it doesn't work? Happy to have an initial look into this (I work on the media team at Mozilla).

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp..., you can log in with a github account or create one

I suspect this user is on Linux and doesn't have h.264 codecs installed.

They should be able to do this fairly easily -- two distros here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/assembly_ins...

This sounds like a problem with your system. I've been using Firefox for years and have never had problems playing MP4s or anything from Instagram or Gfycat.

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