Bug 1219070

I am having the same problem - youtube videos won't play after Chromium upgrade to 120.0.6099.216.  Problem was reported to Chromium in Issue 1919587 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1519587&q=youtube&can=2 and was marked WontFix with "Marking as WontFix since these are distro Chromium builds, please reach out to your distro for support."  See Chromium bug for additional details.

I have the same problem. It only lets you play live streams from youtube. I have installed codecs through opi and the chromium-ffmpeg-extra package and still the same. No problems playing videos with other websites. openSUSE Tumbleweed Gnome

I can confirm this issue.

It appears this is related to the audio decoder, maybe missing codecs?

When playing a mp4 video file with an opus audio track, there is no sound. The video tag shows a grayed out speaker icon, as if the video has no audio track. The video track was h264 and playback was fine.

Youtube gives the following debug information when failing playback:

"vemsg.DECODER_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED_ audio decoder initialization failed"

I can confirm the issue. 

In my case it was introduced by update to chromium 120, platforms like Prime work fine, youtube shows black screen on video canvas with error message. I got the "vemsg.DECODER_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED_ audio decoder initialization failed"
too, audio codec was opus, video codec avc1, -v1 showed no additional information about the issue. 

Backgrading to 119 heals the problem at once.

Just to rule out issue... if you use yt-dlp to grab the file from youtube (use -F/-f to pick the right formats) and attempt to play it with ffplay or mplayer, does it succeed?

@Jan Engelhardt

avc1.64002a (299) / mp4a.40.2 (140) works (Live stream) even in youtube. This could be pointing to opus processing library (or handling).

Mplayer plays the file just fine, gstreamer based totem too. I checked, audio is opus-encoded. Surprisingly video codec is called VP9 though no transcoding has happened.

Hope that helps.

@Jan Engelhardt

avc1.64002a (299) / mp4a.40.2 (140) works (Live stream) even in youtube. This could be pointing to opus processing library (or handling).

Mplayer plays the file just fine, gstreamer based totem too. I checked, audio is opus-encoded. Surprisingly video codec is called VP9 though no transcoding has happened.

Hope that helps.

ok, investigated a bit further: avc1 is only shown as soon as the black "error" screen appears. During the time, when the preview picture is shown with the start button, VP9 is shown as codec. As soon as it changes to black error screen, it switches to avc1. This could mean the original stream is VP9/opus encoded and would explain why the file contains VP9 streams.

I was unable to extract a video file from Youtube that exhibits the problem (I always get the AAC track, regardless of the audio format specified or a video with no audio track).

I did some testing with audio files, either by dragging them in the omnibox or using the <audio> tag.

Works:

- flac
- wav

Doesn't work:

- mp3
- opus

All the files are properly played in Firefox.

Created attachment 872157 [details]
Chromium playback error

I can confirm live streams appear to be working, the attached screenshot shows what happens in every other case.

The initial situation was that YouTube videos played well.

1. A update came and also Chromium to vers. 120.0.6099.224-1.1 was updated. Youtube videos NOK.
2. I updated Chromium back to the previous one 119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64.rpm and Youtube videos work again.
3. new update came again and Chromium was automatically updated to 120.0.6099.224-1.1 again. So I try to update back to vers. 119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64.rpm but I won't succeed anymore:

raija@localhost:~> rpm -ivh chromium-119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64.rpm
error: Missing dependencies:
          libavcodec.so.60(LIBAVCODEC_60.3_SUSE)(64bit) required in chromium-119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64
          libavformat.so.60(LIBAVFORMAT_60.3_SUSE)(64bit) required in chromium-119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64
          libavutil.so.58(LIBAVUTIL_58.2_SUSE)(64bit) is needed in chromium-119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64
          chromium-browser conflicts with -chromium-119.0.6045.199-1.1.x86_64
          chromium-browser conflicts with (installed) -chromium-120.0.6099.224-1.1.x86_64
raija@localhost:~>

Have the same problem. After updating tumbleweed Chromium cannot play youtube videos and cannot play audio streams. Other's browsers like Firefox and Falkon work fine. All codecs reinstalled via opi codecs, but with a chromium it did not help.

Using information about the problem found at:
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/15585

I am working around the problem by adding --disable-features=FFmpegAllowLists to my chromium arguments list.  I had to clear my GPUCache for this to work.  I have no idea if there are any security or other issues using this but it allows videos with opus audio encoding to play.

I can confirm https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1219070#c10

chromium=119.0.6045.199 works, chromium=120.0.6099.224 doesn't

Given that video playback is considered a key functionality of a web browser these days, I am setting the Severity to major.

Will be fixed in 121

Severity level doesn't make any difference

Chrome Stable 121 was released on Feb 7th.

Do we have an ETA when SUSE will follow ?

This is an autogenerated message for OBS integration:
This bug (1219070) was mentioned in
https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1155575 Factory / chromium

Fixed in 121

This is an autogenerated message for OBS integration:
This bug (1219070) was mentioned in
https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1156608 Backports:SLE-15-SP5 / chromium-lp155

This is an autogenerated message for OBS integration:
This bug (1219070) was mentioned in
https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1156764 Factory / ungoogled-chromium
https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1156765 Backports:SLE-15-SP5 / chromium

openSUSE-RU-2024:0078-1: An update that has one recommended fix can now be installed.

Category: recommended (moderate)
Bug References: 1219070
CVE References: 
JIRA References: 
Sources used:
openSUSE Backports SLE-15-SP5 (src):    chromium-120.0.6099.224-bp155.2.70.1