gstreamer1.0-libav - necessary for browsers to play videos?
Apropos of nothing but wishing to supply an explanation to anyone else
who might run into the same issue.
It is my habit to perform apt update followed by apt full-upgrade every
day on my testing systems. I get the impression that this may not be a
common practice, but I've been doing this (apt full-upgrade or, earlier
on, apt-get dist-upgrade) on a daily basis for years with only rare
resulting problems, all of which have been fixed easily.
I also routinely run apt --purge autoremove and debfoster to clear out
packages that are no longer needed.
The recent firefox-esr upgrade resulted in the following output in
/var/log/apt/history.log:
Start-Date: 2017-06-16 10:15:49
Commandline: apt full-upgrade
Install: libjsoncpp1:amd64 (1.7.4-3, automatic)
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (45.9.0esr-1, 52.2.0esr-1~deb9u1)
End-Date: 2017-06-16 10:15:54
I ran debfoster, and it asked me if I wanted to keep gstreamer1.0-libav.
I ran aptitude why gstreamer1.0-libav and got this result:
# aptitude why gstreamer1.0-libav
i task-xfce-desktop Recommends libreoffice
i A libreoffice Suggests gstreamer1.0-libav
Hmmm. Looks like there's no reason to keep gstreamer1.0-libav, so I let
debfoster remove it.
Following this, no browser on the three testing systems I have (firefox,
epiphany, or qupzilla) would play any kind of video at youtube.com or at
any other location.
Following re-installation of gstreamer1.0-libav all browsers were once
again able to play videos.
I would have thought that aptitude why might have given me a hint about
the browsers requiring this package. I've looked to be sure the browsers
do, indeed, have all of their depends and recommends installed, and they
do. (I do not install suggests as a rule, and I don't use any kind of
proprietary codecs or player software. So I am dependent upon the
DFSG-compliant software available in the Debian repositories to play any
video or audio I'm going to use on these systems.)
This is, obviously, not a very serious problem, but it's an interesting
one that might bite others as unwary as I. Maybe it's implicated somehow
in some of the odd reports we see from time-to-time of someone who can't
get a browser to play videos.
Worthy of a bug report?
Thank you for your time.
JP
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