Unable to play media in browser in fresh NixOS 20.03 installation

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1

Hi,

When opening my browser I get greeted this with message:

Media support
Vivaldi lacks a suitable component to play HTML5 ‘proprietary’ media (H.264/AAC)

Clicking “More information” opens this url: HTML5 Proprietary Media On Linux.

I found these two related issues:

  1. Vivaldi widevine outdated and/or broken
  2. Vivaldi browser (chromium) unable to use pepperFlash and widevine plugins

But still being new to NixOS I so far haven’t been able to get something working. Any advice on what I can do to get media working? Or is it easier if I just use another browser?

2

Not entirely sure how the whole webkit vs blink thing goes but anything google (hence blink) doesn’t support h264 by default, only webm. (Apple (webkit) I believe is the inverse situation). Vivaldi I think uses blink. What were you using before NixOS + Vivaldi combination?

3

Thanks for responding, SRGOM!

I used Ubuntu+Vivaldi before this. During the Ubuntu-installation, I always checked the “Install third party drivers ++”-option, which I think included video drivers. I never had to install anything extra to make Vivaldi able to play media.

4

I tried a bunch of different things today and I got it working! I had to add this to my configuration.nix:

nixpkgs.config = {
    allowUnfree = true;
    vivaldi = {
      proprietaryCodecs = true;
      enableWideVine = true;
    };
  };

Note to future self: From reading the vivaldi derivation you saw that there’s a build option proprietaryCodecs which has default value false.

5

I was mistaken. That didn’t actually solve it. Here’s one Youtube video that plays fine and one that doesn’t:

  1. Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XIkmRTCbos
  2. Doesn’t work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMLXkEJXyA

Is this the universe telling me to play more Civ5? Or are the videos in a different format, maybe?

Here’s what the video that doesn’t work look like:

video-not-playing
video-not-playing781×510 12.6 KB

The error there roughly translates to “There was a problem. Try again later. (Play-ID: bladibladibla). Find out more” - and the link in the end just opens a toolbox telling me to check my internet connection and similar.

1 Like
6

Yup, think you need to play some more Civ5.

No concrete suggestions, but this smells like my trouble with Netflix DRM in browsers on Ubuntu. I ended up “just using the provided Firefox”, which they had made an effort to compile to make work …

1 Like
7

Strange… I’m suffering of something like that on both FF and Chromium after the last upgrade of the unstable… In both the browsers videos from youtube don’t play… I’m still trying to understand what’s causing this and if it’s local to my installation or there was something wrong in the latest update.

1 Like
8

Thanks for the report azazel75. That reminds me: I don’t recall having this problem when I was playing around with NixOS 19.03 a while back.