Pop!_OS 20.04: Fix Most Videos Not Playing In Firefox

On a fresh Pop!_OS 20.04 installation, users may be taken by sursprise by the fact that most videos from streaming websites don't work in Firefox. This article explains how to fix this.

Videos not playing on Pop!_OS 20.04 in Firefox
Video not playing in Firefox on Pop!_OS 20.04

If you've just installed Pop!_OS 20.04 and try to play some videos in Firefox, you'll notice that YouTube works, but for most other websites, like Twitch, Netflix, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and so on, playing videos doesn't work (even gifv files on Reddit, gfycat and Imgur).

These are the errors I get when trying to play videos from Twitch, Netflix, Dailymotion and Vimeo in Firefox on a fresh installation of Pop!_OS 20.04:

  • Twitch: This video is either unavailable or not supported in this browser. (Error #4000)
  • Netflix: Pardon the interruption. Sorry, we're having trouble with your request. Error Code F7355
  • Dailymotion: Sorry... Please update your browser or try a different one
  • Vimeo: Player error. The player is having trouble. We'll have it back up and running as soon as possible.

There's no bug in Firefox causing the video playback to fail on so many video streaming websites. It's just missing some codecs.

Playing videos Firefox Pop!_OS 20.04
Video playback works in Firefox on Pop!_OS 20.04 after installing the packages mentioned below

To get Firefox to play videos from any website on Pop!_OS 20.04, you'll need to install the libavcodec-extra package. To do this, open a terminal and type:

sudo apt install libavcodec-extra

Installing this libavcodec-extra package will also pull some dependencies, together with which all videos should now play in Firefox web browser running on Pop!_OS 20.04.